


my fingers will find yours

by choomchoom



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Functionist Universe (Transformers), Imprisonment, Multi, Psychological Torture, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-01 19:20:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 26,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20263213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: In one universe, Anode and Lug lose 500 years to a treasure hunt on Luna 2 gone wrong. Here, the same jaunt to Cybertron gets them imprisoned by the Functionist Council under the tutelage of an AI bent on getting them to become rule-abiding Functionist citizens. The only thing on Anode’s mind is, of course, escape. Escape turns out to come at an unexpected cost.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I'm excited to get this fic out there. This is my fic for the TF Big Bang, and as such it comes with (wonderful, breathtaking) art! The illustration linked in Chapter 12 is by writerdragon and the illustration linked in Chapter 13 is by ming (mingdotmp3).

Lug should have known better than to let Anode get them into this situation.

Well, she had known better, was the thing. What she should have done was insisted. There being Sentio Metallico buried on Cybertron’s moon didn’t mean that they had to risk their pit-damned lives for it. There was treasure elsewhere. But this was the only chance that Anode would have to be able to say that she’d not only survived a jaunt to Cybertron, but that she’d come out richer.

It wasn’t worth it. It had never been worth it. Lug. Should. Have. Insisted.

“We need to go,” she said for the fourth or fifth time, watching the security patrol advancing on them as Anode dug through the dirt.

“I almost have – ha!” Anode yanked something out of the ground. It must have been sentio metallico, just like Anode had suspected. It shone in the light, even through the layer of grit covering its surface.

Lug stopped admiring it to duck when a laser bolt whizzed right between her and Anode. “Now can we leave?” she asked.

Anode tucked the sentio metallico away and held out a hand, their signal for Lug to transform and hop on. She did so in relief, flinching as the security patrollers got close enough for Lug to hear their shouts.

Lug’s vision changed direction as Anode slung her over her shoulders and lifted off. She had a view of nothing but the sky, and the wind made any commotion back on the ground inaudible. She couldn’t help but relax into the familiar position, tucked against Anode. It had been a close call, but now, all that mattered was that they were getting out of here. They were going to be safe.

Anode’s flight path rocked and slowly straightened.

“You okay?” Lug asked.

“Fine. Turbulence.”

This moon’s atmosphere was way too thin for turbulence. But if Anode didn’t want Lug to know that they were in trouble, pressuring her about it wasn’t going to help.

The next shot sent Anode spinning. Lug could feel the altitude loss in all her systems. She caught a glimpse of the ship they’d arrived here in. They were _so close_.

Anode corrected for whatever had sent her rolling and brought them curving toward the ship. They were thirty seconds away – twenty –

The third shot seemed to catch Anode dead center and she dropped, the ship still getting cruelly closer in front of them until Lug realized that she had to leap away and transform to avoid being crushed in the fall. She did exactly that, springing away from Anode and transforming just before hitting the hard surface of the moon.

Lug’s vision went briefly black from the hit and she groaned. Then she forced her protesting systems back online and rolled over to check on Anode.

She was conscious, Lug noticed with relief, and she’d transformed back into her hardier root mode too. Her optics were flickering but not off.

Lug noted scorch marks on her wings and trickle of energon leaking out from her side before she looked past Anode at the security patrol advancing toward them. She couldn’t think of anything to do but reach for Anode’s hand, her battered systems protesting even at the small motion, and hold on. Anode’s fingers tightened around hers and then slackened as her optics went dark.

Lug kept still as the patrol advanced on the two of them, guns drawn. There were three mechs standing in a triangular formation, all identical as far as Lug could tell. Their frames were gray and stark, alt modes unclear from the blocky plating. All of them wore facemasks under golden visors.

“Welcome to Cybertron, newcomers,” said the mech closest to Lug, without moving his gun from its position trained on her face.

Newcomers, not thieves. Why had they shot at them, if they didn’t even realize that the two of them had been here to steal? Lug wished for Anode, who would know exactly how to play this, but her optics stayed dark. The flow of energon from the side of her chest had slowed and her engine still rumbled quietly, so Lug was assured that she would be alright, but that didn’t stop her from wishing that she were awake right now. She didn’t want to do this alone.

“We’re not newcomers,” Lug said, truth having always come more easily to her than lies. “We’re from here.”

“All returnees are newcomers to the Functionist way of life,” said the lead mech. “The planet you remember has been improved on.”

“What’s going to happen?” Lug asked. Despite the civility of the conversation, there were still three guns trained on her. It was disconcerting.

“Returnees are housed in orbit for the time it takes to complete their education and be deemed able to be integrated into society,” said the mech. He stepped forward, the gun now point-blank to Lug’s face and more precious brain module. “You will stand and follow us.”

“Our things are on that ship,” Lug said. Their treasures and mementos from old adventures carried a combination of sentimental and monetary value, and Anode would not be happy if they had to abandon them here.

The mech closest to the ship pivoted and took a shot at the engine. The resultant explosion was terrific, the heat of it blasting Lug backwards a foot. When the smoke cleared, all that was left of the ship was charred metal and a small crater.

“You won’t need that anymore,” said the lead mech. “Functionism provides all that is necessary for a fulfilling and prosperous life.”

The mech who’d shot the ship’s engine produced a pair of stasis cuffs from a compartment and started to advance on Lug. The lead mech seemed to notice Lug eyeing them suspiciously.

“A precaution,” he said. “Until we are able to assess your degree of reluctance to complete training.”

Everything about this was setting off alarms in Lug’s mind, but with Anode unconscious at her side and her only escape route dust in the wind, Lug had no choice but to let herself be cuffed and marched to the patrollers’ shuttle, and nothing to do but watch and clutch Anode’s unresponsive hand as the shuttle lifted off from the moon and settled in the belly of a giant orbiting ship.


	2. Chapter 2

Anode woke up and immediately regretted it. The patches on her wings and chassis pulled painfully, and she wasn’t given even one second to wonder how she had acquired them. The memory was crystal (ugh) clear. “Urghhhh.”

“You awake?” There was a thread of anxiety in Lug’s voice, and Anode abruptly realized that all else aside, she had in fact been shot down with Lug on her back and then passed out in front of her. Lug needed checking on.

Anode onlined her optics, focusing on the splotch of red that was hovering in front of her. Slowly her optical circuitry rebooted and the red blob resolved into Lug, kneeling in front of Anode, features tight with worry. “Go on,” Anode said. “Say it. You’ve earned it.”

Lug’s expression flipped to one of vindication. “I told you so,” she said, clearly savoring every word.

“Should’ve listened,” Anode said. The floor she was lying on was cold, and the patches on her gunshot wounds felt like they’d been slapped on without any regard for damaged internals. Anode could have done a better job herself. She’d probably have to peel off the patch and rearrange some lines so that they’d heal properly, but that could wait until later when her head was feeling less fuzzy from low fuel. Lug would just worry upon hearing any of that, and Anode would have to reassure her, so the whole thing was best avoided. “Any idea where we are?” she asked instead.

“A ship. I think we’re orbiting the planet – those patrollers told me that this is where they house ‘returnees.’” Lug’s air-quotes came with a skeptical expression. 

“We can work with that,” Anode said, reaching up to cover her optics with one hand as she thought. “Ship means shuttles, escape pods, something to commandeer. We just have to find them, break out, and skedaddle.”

“You need to rest, first,” Lug said, the disapproval in her tone at odds with the way she reached over to stroke Anode’s jawline. “I’m sure you’ll come up with a better plan when you’re not actively leaking energon.”

“You don’t think that’s a good plan?” Anode mumbled, systems tugging her back toward unconsciousness.

A sound at the door jerked her back online. The door to the nondescript, windowless room they were in hissed with hydraulics as it slid open, revealing a hovering drone, gray-plated, that looked like it had been repurposed from a medibay.

“Your first Readiness Class begins in ten minutes,” someone said through its speaker in a gravelly monotone. “Come now to the classroom.”

“If we’re on a ship we certainly don’t need ten whole minutes to get from one place to an – yow!” Anode was cut off when the drone reached out a spindly stick of a limb to shock her hard in the arm.

“Careful! She’s hurt,” Lug said.

“She will heal,” the drone said. “Follow.”

Lug took Anode’s hand with an exaggerated motion that let Anode know that Lug would throw an absolute fit if she protested this. Anode let her help her up. The ache in her side from the hasty patch job protested the movement, and she kept Lug’s hand in hers as they followed the drone down a long, curved hallway.

Anode surveyed their surroundings as they walked, letting Lug keep her on course. There were sporadic windows here, meaning that this was the closest walkway to the outside of the ship. They were clearly in some kind of orbit, based on the view. Far away, she caught a glimpse of the surface of Cybertron. A few doors in the wall opposite the windows looked like they led to cells like the one Anode and Lug had come from.

Not much to work with yet. But based on the curve they were following, Anode had a rough idea of the ship’s dimensions by the time the drone shepherded Anode and Lug through a door into an uncomfortably bright room.

“Welcome,” blasted a voice from what felt like every inch of the room’s walls. While Anode jumped at that, the door closed behind her and Lug. “You may call me Unifier. I exist as a courtesy in order to allow outsiders access to Functionism and Cybertron.”

“And chance you could lower your voice, dingus?” Anode asked.

There was a sudden zap of pain at Anode’s foot, and she overbalanced on clumsy limbs to avoid it, knocking into Lug’s shoulder before Lug managed to steady her.

“First warning,” said Unifier, in what seemed to be an even louder voice. Then, as if nothing had happened, a video started to play on the curved walls that surrounded them, forcing Anode to keep her head on a swivel if she wanted to get all the information that was being broadcast. It was still overwhelming, so much to that everything they were conveying couldn’t possibly be important enough for Unifier to actually want them to know.

Unifier kept speaking through the visual cacophony. “You have been identified as returnees to Cybertron, here to take your proper place as determined by your natural function. Primus and the Guiding Hand have acted favorably in bringing you back home to us, and all we ask is that you act in accordance with that blessing.”

“This is all a huge misunderstanding,” Anode said, hands held up placatingly, as if that would keep the floor from shocking her. “We actually don’t want to be here. Took a wrong turn at the Scarsopone Nebula, you see, we never intended to –” She yelped at the expected electric shock but kept her balance this time.

“Second warning,” Unifier said. “Do not interrupt. If your function was of a lower position in the Grand Cybertronian Taxonomy, such insubordination would have resulted in Discipline Level Two.”

“Anode, just listen,” Lug whispered fervently, while Unifier was quiet. “We might need this information.”

But Anode had seen and heard enough. “I don’t care what you think of me, flattering as I think whatever it is you just said is supposed to be. Are you one of those dumbass AIs that I can trick into telling me how to get out of here?”

“There is no third warning.”

At the ominous words, Anode was suddenly falling through the floor into a chute too narrow to allow her to transform. Lug grabbed at her hand, but Anode’s momentum was too much for her grip. The last thing Anode heard before the trapdoor closed above her was Lug’s frustrated scream, and then she was falling into darkness.


	3. Chapter 3

The trapdoor in the floor closed. Then the clamps had been locking Lug’s feet to the floor, keeping her from going after Anode properly, released, sending her stumbling. She could feel her hands shaking through the numbness that seemed to have suddenly lodged itself in her chest.

“What did you do to her?” Lug asked. Anode would have shouted it, but Lug only managed to get all the words out in a whisper.

“Severity of punishment increases for each instance of insubordination,” Unifier said. “Your companion is greatly valued by the Grand Cybertronian Taxonomy, and as such she has been sent to the Cold Room.”

Lug risked another question. “So she’s alive?”

“Yes. And she will remain so. Many other levels of punishment exist to give returnees like her the opportunity to understand their place.”

Lug tried for another good-faith question, hoping that she wasn’t pushing her luck. “What would it take for me to be sent to the Cold Room?” Unifier’s phrasing implied that there was only one.

“One instance of insubordination, one instance of self-injurious behavior, or one first-degree minimization of the importance of your function and Functionism.”

“Okay,” Lug said, internalizing that and sitting cross-legged on the floor. This AI may have been too much for Anode, but when Lug spoke to her, she seemed reasonable, willing to answer questions, tolerant of Lug’s curiosities. She was going to use this time to get as much information out of her as she could. Fixing her optics on the part of the bustling screen in front of her, she took in a cityscape of Cybertronians going about their business. Aside from the massive scale and detail, it looked…peaceful. Even utopian. “What’s Functionism?”

“That is the first topic I was going to discuss to orient you and your companion to your new home,” Unifier said. “Functionism is the Guiding Hand’s ultimate gift, a pathway to Cybertronian peace, prosperity, and success. At its core, it is what follows from all Cybertronian citizens accepting the gifts and limitations offered by their alt mode to contribute to Cybertron.”

“Okay,” Lug said. “So my alt mode is a backpack. Gifts that offers would be…it keeps me humble? That really is a good thing. It means that I have to work with someone else to be useful, that I need to be able to cooperate with other people. I don’t know that I would ever have gotten quite so good at that with a different alt mode. Limitations are…more obvious. It’s not mobile. It’s not cool.”

“All alt modes are ‘cool,’” interjected Unifier.

“I guess that could be true, these days,” said Lug. This was good. The information that Unifier was giving Lug was invaluable. Lug could hide her skepticism of some of what Unifier was saying, at least for now. “You said that this is a class. What would it take to pass?”

“Acceptance of your alt mode as your primary point of identification, understanding of the principles of Functionism as demonstrated by written and oral exam performance, and successful completion of alt-mode appropriate job training,” Unifier said.

As Lug had suspected, the day Lug would be able to talk Anode into going through all of that would be the day that Lug sprouted wings – especially when Anode already had plans to escape. “And what happens next?” she asked, just out of curiosity. If they’d be free to go in a few weeks anyway, maybe Anode could be talked into getting out the less risky way.

“Integration of the newcomer into Cybertronian society for an indefinite probationary period.”

Lug straightened her spinal conduit. Not escape, not freedom, exactly, but – a life. Security, stability, a job. There were obvious, gaping downsides to this place, but for what it offered…maybe they were worth it.

There was one more thing that Lug needed to check before joining Anode. “You called Anode my companion,” she said. “Will you explain what you meant by that?”

“It is my understanding based on observation that you conceive of Anode as your _conjunx endura_,” said Unifier. “The social construct of _conjunx endura_ has no function. Functionism recognizes Anode as your traveling companion based on your joint arrival at the Readiness Center. We have found that housing fellow travelers together helps to expose potential avenues of insubordination.”

_Yeah, whatever you say_. And the reminder of Anode enough for Lug to be too worried to want to continue this. “That’s all I want to know,” Lug said. “I don’t want to live a society where I can’t call Anode my conjunx endura.”

She had braced herself for the floor to drop out from beneath her, but it was still a shock when it happened, sending her tumbling down a dark metal chute until she hit hard floor. She heard the trapdoor slide shut above her through the ringing in her ears from the hard hit.

“Lug?” Anode’s voice was raspy, like her vocalizer had half-shut down to save power. Lug picked her face up off the floor, orienting toward Anode’s weakened voice.

Anode looked terrible, even though she hadn’t even been here an hour. It occurred to Lug only then that she ought to have asked Unifier how long this particular punishment lasted. Anode’s optics were in powersave, glowing only a faint yellow as Anode curled around the wound in her side, which had started freshly leaking, probably from the fall. Her shoulders shook with an autonomic reaction to the cold, expending valuable energy to keep her essential systems online.

Lug walked over to her, the cold already beginning to sink into her plating and ventilation system. She laid back down next to Anode, putting her arm around Anode’s uninjured side. Anode leaned her face into Lug’s chest and Lug moved her other arm around Anode’s neck, holding her close.

“Our cell is near the very back of the ship,” Anode said. “We’re in orbit around either Cybertron or Luna 2, but either way, the way we were walking is the way we were moving. I’d bet that pit-damned piece of sentio metallico that there’s an avenue for emergency egress within the five hundred yards behind that cell. We’ll probably have to slip onto a different level to access it though, especially if the one we were on was originally constructed to house people.”

“Please don’t talk,” Lug said. “You need to save your energy.” Anode had been hurt, and neither of them had been given any fuel since their capture. Lug wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be part of the escalating torture that Unifier had described, but Lug couldn’t discount the possibility.

“I’ll get us out of here,” Anode said. “We always make it out.”

“Things like that tend to stay true until they don’t,” Lug said, instead of what she really wanted to say, which was _not if you get yourself killed_. She didn’t want to argue right now, though. Later, when they were safe, she would push it. “Try to recharge.”

“If we can make an access point to the emergency egress route, all we need to do is manufacture a reason for an emergency egress. An explosive in any essential system should be plenty.”

“So all we have to do is find the materials for an explosive, make an explosive, set it off without getting immediately caught, and avoid damaging the ship so much that we’d be sucked out into space immediately?”

Anode nodded against Lug’s chest. “Mm-hmm,” she replied, oblivious to the sarcasm.

Lug suppressed a heavy sigh – now wasn’t the time to push it. But while they were here, already having a conversation that could get them killed… “Anode.”

“Mmph.”

“We have to be careful while they’re watching. They’re keeping us together to make it easier to find excuses to hurt us. They could separate us if they think we’re up to something.”

Anode finally unwrapped her arms from around herself and pulled Lug closer. “I’d like to see them try,” she said, her voice even more broken than it had been before.

Lug stroked a thumb across Anode’s cheek. “Go to sleep, please,” she said. “I’ll be here.” And maybe when she woke up she’d be willing to talk about this like a rational person. For now, Lug shivered in Anode’s arms as the cold seeped deeper and deeper into her frame. She started counting seconds, which she would continue doing until they were released.


	4. Chapter 4

Okay, so maybe – _maybe_ – in retrospect, Anode should have kept a little bit of a lower profile.

The hours in the Cold Room were miserable, no two ways about it. Anode was sullen enough to keep her mouth shut when the door finally opened and she and Lug were pulled to their feet and marched on stiff legs right back to the round room that housed Unifier. Unifier talked for a little while, going through the lesson that she had been planning to administer the previous day. Anode tuned it out but kept quiet, to Lug’s obvious relief. The quiz at the end of the session was painfully easy – she picked the most “dystopian hellscape”-sounding answer to each question and scored better than Lug did.

A panel of floor started to rise once the exam scores had disappeared from the screen and Anode leapt away from it, fearing the worst. She grabbed Lug’s shoulder, ready to pull Lug behind her if – if –

The panel flipped open to reveal a table with two cubes of energon on it.

“Is this some kind of test?” Anode asked, hoping for an actual response, and not putting a _yes_ past this place. Unifier was either turned off or otherwise disinclined to answer, though. Lug lifted Anode’s hand off of her shoulder and wrapped their hands together, using the link to pull Anode toward the table.

“Why would it be a test?” Lug said. “If she wanted to kill us, why go to all the effort just to end it with poison?” She unsealed one of the cubes and held it in front of Anode, expression saying that she’d hold it there all day if Anode made her.

Anode took the cube. “You never know. Maybe she was just keeping us around for the entertainment value.”

“You’re not that entertaining.” Lug took a sip of her own cube, ignoring Anode as Anode’s jaw dropped at that massive burn.

“_Ouch_.” But, credit to her, Lug’s words had cured Anode of her reluctance. She took a sip of her own cube, which tasted like normal energon, if a bit weaker than she’d expected from Cybertron. This was the highly-filtered, unbalanced swill she’d come to associate with Caminus.

After they fueled, Unified kept them locked in the Reeducation Room, which was what she had called this place during the lesson. “Maybe this is the fun new torture scenario,” Anode said. “She leaves the two of us alone here and sees how long it takes for us to kill each other.”

“Little does she know we’ve been traveling together for centuries and have had to suffer only other’s company for months at a time.”

“Well, when we were traveling we at least had entertainment –”

Whatever Anode would have said next was interrupted by the door sliding open. The drone was back. “Come,” it said. Anode realized now that its voice matched Unifier’s. At least it was quieter.

Anode could feel Lug’s half-steely half-anxious gaze on her, but even without it, she doubted that she would have tried anything. She had a plan to escape – eventually. She didn’t particularly feel like seeing whatever next-level torture Unifier could cook up in this place, and she definitely needed to recharge. Lug’s sigh of relief was audible as she started toward the door.

They made it back to their cell unceremoniously. There were two recharge berths set up in opposite corners, each barely big enough for one of them. That detail alone made Anode angry enough to want to get out of here immediately, but Lug just headed for one of the berths, plugging in and collapsing across it in a clumsy, tired motion.

Fine. Escape could wait until tomorrow.

Anode grudgingly plugged into the other recharge port and tried to settle. The wound in her side still ached, and even the scratches on her wings, which would have healed within hours if this place wasn’t such a hellhole, still twigged her sometimes.

It wasn’t so bad that she couldn’t recharge, though. She was feeling herself starting to drift off when –

_CLANG_.

“Wha–?” Lug’s vocalizer stuttered like she was jolting back online.

“Urghhhhhh,” Anode contributed.

_CLANG_.

Anode was certain that this was the next phase of torture – recharge deprivation was baseline stuff. Tired people would do things, agree to things, that they ordinarily wouldn’t, because the imperative to sleep overrode logic and morals and everything else Unifier seemed determined to beat out of them.

_CLANG_.

Well, if this was all it was going to be, maybe Anode would be able to get used to it. If it was just one loud noise at regular intervals, enough repetition might desensitize her audial receptors enough that she could sleep despite it.

_CRASH_.

Anode onlined her optics and sat bolt upright, hissing as her side complained about the motion. Palms on the wound, she looked at the spot the noise had come from.

Between Lug’s berth and the door, one of the metal panels had come loose from the center of the wall, making a hole about a meter square, ending just low enough that Anode could now see into the next room.

Staring at Anode from the other side of the wall was a single optic attached to an improbably long neck. The mech’s plating was scuffed, dented, and scarred every which way and some of it looked improperly integrated, like it had been removed and then been too damaged to reattach properly. A grating sound accompanied even the tiniest of his movements.

Empurata had been one of the things that had driven Anode to convince Lug to leave Cybertron in the first place, and it struck at a spot of primal fear deep inside her even now. Had that happened to him here, on this ship?

The mech looked around the room, taking in Lug, who had scrambled off her recharge berth and was now standing in front of Anode, and then Anode.

“I thought I heard new neighbors,” the mech said, voice lilting and irreverent, which Anode would never have expected from his battered frame. “Howdy. I’m Whirl.”

Anode looked at Lug, who was already looking at her. Anode had to say something, and settled on “When did you get here?”

“That’s something I prefer not to think about,” Whirl said. “Unless you mean ‘here’ as in ‘back in this cell,’ which has been my home base for –” Whirl laughed for what felt like a solid minute. “If that’s what you meant, I got back about two hours ago.”

“Where’d you come from?” Anode asked.

Whirl recoiled his head a little, presumably back toward his own room. “Jeepers. You with your deep-cut questions,” he said. “You must be new, or you wouldn’t be asking that so nonchalantly.”

“Fair enough,” Lug said.

The silence stretched awkwardly before Anode gave up trying to think of something to ask that would get them a straight answer. “So, did you have, like, a reason for breaking into our room? Because honestly, we were trying to get some sleep.”

“Just wanted to say howdy,” Whirl said. “And, y’know, good luck. I’m still here and willing to bust down these slagged walls when I can.”

“Thanks,” Lug said awkwardly, just as Anode had an idea.

“Wait!” she said as Whirl’s head started to disappear back into the hole in the wall.

“Yes?”

“How did you get that panel off the wall?” If they could get in and out of the cell without Unifier knowing, they were halfway to escaping already.

“Brute force,” Whirl said. “She reinforced the doors and ceilings and floors after the last incident, but doesn’t seem to care so much that we can talk to each other.”

Anode finally climbed off the berth and walked over to examine the panel that had clattered to the floor on their side of the two cells. She knelt effortfully and picked it up.

In between the crushed layer of metal that had marked Whirl’s side and the more intact one that had been on theirs were crushed wires from some electrical system in the walls. That was promising. It was a start.

“Be seeing you, Whirl,” Anode said, hefting up the tile to reposition it. For now.

Whirl bobbed his head and stepped back. Anode got a glimpse of his cell, similar to the one she and Lug were in but dirtier, as she replaced the tile with a screeching noise.

“Anode?” Lug’s voice was curious.

“Get some sleep, poppet,” Anode said. “We won’t be in this place long.”

Lug sighed but didn’t argue. Anode counted it as a win. 

**

Building an explosive wasn’t all that hard. Anode had studied the art of it for both practicality and vanity’s sake – she’d known that it would be helpful if she ever found herself in a situation resembling this one, but really at the time she’d been imagining it as a fun party trick.

Scraps of wire from the walls, a pilfered cube to serve as a repository for the innermost energon that they would need for the explosion, and a few chunks of metal that would spark when thrust together would be all they needed.

Anode woke up the next morning with the plan ready to be enacted. First thing, she went to remove the panel that Whirl had so kindly loosened so that she could get at the wiring in the walls.

The instant she loosened the tile, she realized that there were voices coming from the room next door. She would have stayed right there to eavesdrop, but the panel had already made too much noise.

“Neighbors?” Whirl’s voice was pitched flat, not the overly friendly tone from before. Oddly, it reassured Anode that he was for real, rather than being some kind of counterintuitive Functionist plant.

“Yes, hello,” Anode said, pulling the tile all the way out from the wall. Behind her, Lug sighed.

Anode caught a glimpse of two red optics glaring at her from the other side of Whirl’s cell, through a window similar to the one he’d made into Anode and Lug’s. The eyes disappeared as soon as Anode noticed them, though, the bearer disappearing out of Anode’s line of sight.

“Oh, come on, Hornhead, what do you think they’re going to do to us?” Whirl asked. “They’re newbies, not enemies. I can tell. I would know. It’s just –” Whirl cocked his head to one side. “What were your names again?”

“We never said,” said Anode. “But, um, I’m Anode. Nice to meet you, Hornhead.”

“My name,” came a low voice. “Is not Hornhead.”

Anode waited for more information – like, for example, what his name actually was – but Hornhead didn’t seem inclined to offer any more information.

Anode made a snap decision. She didn’t trust them, they didn’t trust her, and the Functionists had not shown themselves to be creative enough for this to be some sort of trap. “Sorry to interrupt. I just need to borrow your wall for a second,” she said. With that, she hopped up so that she was balanced on the thin ledge between Whirl’s room and theirs and bent down to pluck the most intact-looking pieces of wire she could out of the mess. Lug was glowering at her from a corner where Whirl and Hornhead wouldn’t be able to see her, but they could settle that later, after Anode was proven right.

“You’re breaking out.” Whirl’s voice was awed. He crossed the room in one long step to rap on Hornhead’s wall with a claw. “Come on, you. I know we don’t often meet new folks around here, but this is one of those times where you really ought to be polite.”

“Like you’ve been polite a day in your life,” Hornhead’s voice was back, but Anode still couldn’t see him when she snuck a glance toward the other hole in Whirl’s wall.

“Shush. You wouldn’t know. Maybe there was one day, once,” Whirl said.

“Telling me your name would be a good start,” Anode said, examining her collection of blacksmith’s tools for something that might be adequate for stripping wires. Lug had a wire stripper, but Anode wasn’t willing to find out if Lug was currently too mad at her to cooperate.

“Cyclonus,” the other mech said. Anode caught movement in her peripheral vision and looked across Whirl’s cell again, where she found Cyclonus’s optics once again burning into her.

“There we go,” she said. “Now all you have to do is keep this a secret from the Functionists.”

“I would never divulge information to the Functionists,” Cyclonus said.

“Fabulous,” said Anode. She had a fistful of wires now, more than enough for what she had in mind. “Sounds like we’ll be getting along quite nicely.”


	5. Chapter 5

Lug had spent a lot of time angry at Anode. She’d been angry at Anode for stupid risks, for being insensitive, for making choices on impulse – Anode knew the whole list. This? This was all of the above. This was all of Anode’s most irritating traits crashing together into the stupidest plan that Lug had ever heard of.

“You’re mad at me,” Anode said, walking back over to her berth with that godforsaken bundle of wires. She sat and started sorting them into piles, producing an empty energon cube from subspace and setting it next to them.

Lug just crossed her arms, leaning back against the wall as she watched Anode work. She was mad at Anode, sure, but she didn’t think that even Anode right now deserved to hear exactly how cross Lug was.

“I don’t get why you’re against this. We have to get out of here. I have a way to get out of here. There’s nothing else we can do.”

“There’s another way out.” Lug had to say it, couldn’t believe that Anode couldn’t see that.

“What?”

Lug just glared.

“What, you mean graduating? You really want to get sent down to that garbage planet to live in function-dictated hell forever?”

“Caminus wasn’t good enough for you. Cybertron isn’t good enough for you. One of these days I’m going to stop believing that you actually want to settle down anywhere.” Lug regretted what she’d said as soon as the words left her vocalizer. This was the crux of the argument, really. The crux of all of it. She shouldn’t have said it – she’d been avoiding saying it for thousands of years. Most days, she didn’t really believe it. But the thought never really went away. “This? This is so dangerous, and you haven’t convinced me that it’s worth it.”

“You hated Caminus too! You didn’t even want to stay while I was in training!”

“I didn’t want to stay because I couldn’t get a job there, and I didn’t want to sit around for a decade while you did your internship. But if you’d wanted to stay there? I would have found a way to fit in. I would have made it work. You _knew_ that.”

“We shouldn’t have to adapt to a place. We shouldn’t have to settle for something that’s less than perfect for us,” Anode said. “Anyway, more to the point, Cybertron is a disaster.”

“We don’t know that. We have no idea what it’s really like on the surface.”

“But if we get to the surface, do you think they’ll let us leave from there? You know the gossip – Cybertronians don’t leave. Not for centuries. We’re in orbit. The safety measures on this ship are the only path out we have for sure.”

“It’s so dangerous, Anode. We don’t know what else Unifier could do to us. It’s a risk we don’t have to take!”

Anode’s hands had never stopped twisting wires. “We’ll find the right place Lug, one day. But this isn’t it.”

Lug had no arguments left that she hadn’t already voiced, so she squashed the temptation to respond with _you never listen_ and sat back on the berth in silence.

When the drone came, Anode smoothly stashed the bomb component she’d been working on somewhere within the berth frame. Like the day before, they were marched to Unifier’s room. Lug was slightly relieved as the door shut behind them. This annoyance would give Lug time to think, and she would figure out how to convince Anode not to go through with her stupid plan.

“Identify yourselves,” said Unifier after the door had shut behind them.

“Lug of the Celestica Tetracornacapria, backpack,” said Lug.

“Go fuck yourself,” said Anode.

Lug slapped a hand over her face in exasperation as the chamber around them turned red. Clamps sprung up from the floor and encircled Anode’s feet – and Lug’s.

“I hope you’re enjoying yourself,” said Unifier. “I’ve learned sarcasm from one of my other tenants, but I still feel the need to clarify: I do not hope that you’re enjoying yourself.”

Lug tried to lunge toward Anode, and just managed to strain the cables in her ankles for the trouble. All she could do was watch in horror as a large needle poked out of one of the clamps at Anode’s feet and punctured her plating. Anode tried to flinch away from it but couldn’t budge the cables that were locking her feet in place.

“What’s going to happen?” Lug asked.

“The Functionist Council’s scientists developed a serum for the purposes of extracting self-knowledge,” said Unifier. “My developers implemented it as a method of self-interrogation, if you will. It gives Cybertronians who have yet to accept Functionism the opportunity to see through the pretenses they build for themselves in order to deny their alt mode and true purpose.”

“What’s in it?” Lug asked, as Anode’s vents hitched once, twice.

“The compound is a mnemoactive hallucinogen,” Unifier said. “The Blacksmith will be reliving whichever memories are most strongly connected to the fear centers in her brain module.”

Anode looked like she was attempting to step out of the foot clamps and fell over backwards with a crash. She didn’t appear to notice the change in position, her hands frantically waving in strange patterns, as if she was trying to shape the air in front of her.

“No,” she was saying over and over, in a whisper that built to a shout. “NOOOOOOO!”

Lug didn’t ask any more questions. She couldn’t decide whether to look at Anode or not.

Her eyes were yanked back to Anode when Anode screamed outright. Her palms were on the floor next to her now, as if she was balancing herself while trying to back up.

“Anode?” Lug whispered.

“She can’t hear you,” Unifier asserted.

So Lug stood there, no longer able to resist keeping her eyes on Anode. She knew that there was nothing to do to help, or to keep her safe. All she could do was stand there and try to piece together what Anode might be seeing.

But it was totally unfamiliar. What Anode was acting out wasn’t anything Lug recognized. She tried to suss out what it might be, and then decided to instead do her best not to think about anything.

Eventually it ended. Anode stopped moving around and twitching and instead she just lay on the floor, shivering. Lug could see that her optics were pointed straight ahead, unfocused.

As soon as Anode’s movements stopped, Unifier released them both from the floor. Lug dove toward Anode, knocking her knees into the hard metal floor in her haste. She went to take Anode’s hand, but Anode flinched away at her first touch, hand snapping back to press against her chest.

“Anode?”

Anode’s head snapped up from the floor and she reset her optics, seeming to finally recognize Lug. The next second, she had launched herself toward Lug, who stumbled back in order to catch her. They steadied into a hug, Anode clutching onto Lug like she was about to be swept away by a tidal wave.

Then they were pushed apart. Lug was swept into the air and then lost contact with Anode and fell. She hit her helm on the floor and then looked up as her vision spun. At first she thought that the hit had damaged something, and that the sight in front of her was actually some disconnect between her optics and her visual processing centers.

But it was still there after her vision should have normalized. Instead of the other half of the room, there was a wall of smooth metal, all the way through to the door.

“Warning: second offense will elevate you to the next level of punishment,” Unifier said. “Contact during lessons has been determined to be detrimental and will no longer be tolerated.”

Lug vented in then out. “Okay. Do the lesson. I’m listening.” She did her best to ignore the pounding of her spark at having to know that Anode was alone and vulnerable on the other side of the wall.

Deep inside, she knew that she would follow Anode’s plan now. She didn’t want Anode subjected to this a minute longer than she had to be. The whole lesson was underlaid with the memory of the awful sound of Anode’s scream.

Lug needed Anode, and Anode needed to leave. If that meant they couldn’t even try find a place for themselves on this planet, Lug accepted that with her whole spark.


	6. Chapter 6

Anode waited until Lug was asleep to knock on the hidden window in the wall. She had the receptacle for the innermost energon that she planned to use as an explosive ready and she had the location to set it off – a grate in the hallway that led from the cells to Unifier that was labeled as an access point to the ship’s life support systems – picked out.

Everything else was outside her control – how to get the explosive to go off at the right time, how to plant it, and how to get off of the ship. She was hoping that Whirl, with all the experience he’d had here, would have insight on at least one of the problems.

“You’ll never take me alive,” came a hiss from the other side of the door.

“It’s me,” Anode whispered.

“Oh, I know,” Whirl said in his normal voice. He began to slide the panel from his side of the wall. Anode moved to catch it so that it wouldn’t crash to the floor and wake Lug.

She moved the tile to the ground and used it as a step to boost herself to sit on the grout where it had been so that she was at eye level with Whirl.

“My conjunx is sleeping,” Anode said, keeping her voice down.

“Conjunx, huh?” Whirl asked. “And yet you call on me in the depths of the night. Classy, Anode.”

“Shut up,” she said. “I need your help.” She explained what she still needed for the plan.

“We can retry part of Escape Attempt Eleven,” Whirl said.

“I don’t know what that means, but I can tell it’s a terrible idea,” Anode said.

Whirl did something with his face reminiscent of pouting. “You haven’t even heard what it is.”

“Well, you said it was an escape attempt, and you’re still here.”

Whirl reeled back, and Anode experienced a fleeting moment of self-reflection before he put a friendly claw on her shoulder. “Fair point,” he said. “Luckily, Escape Attempt Eleven didn’t get far enough for me to use it. The back walls of our cells weren’t reinforced with the rest, and some sections of them back up to open spaces. There’s a way to get from my cell to level below. I didn’t get all the way there, that time – I took a wrong turn and it shunted me into the engine room. I don’t think she realized that I know where I went wrong.”

“What’s on the level below?” Anode asked. “And if you have this passage, why haven’t you used it yet?”

“When they brought me here, there were two doors, one leading out to the shuttle bay and the other just forming a little airlock between that and the rest of the ship. As for your second question -” Whirl lifted his arms, still gruesome to look at and making worrying grinding sounds. “Escape Attempt Eleven was a week ago. Needed a breather.” He dropped his arms and looked straight at Anode. “Both doors to the shuttle bay will probably be decked out with weapons and cameras. We need to get the cameras out first.” 

“If we put the bomb in the right place, we won’t need to worry about the cameras. A breach in life support will trigger a shutdown of nonessential systems.”

“When exactly do you plan to do this?” Whirl asked.

“ASAP, as soon as we get the bomb stuff ready. All of us get in our room, Lug and I go with them, you and Hornhead keep the door from closing and follow us. You disable the drone, I plant the bomb, and we all make a dash for the shuttle bay while Unifier’s attention is on the damage to the life support system,” she said.

Whirl bobbed his optic in an approximation of a nod.

“As for a timeframe – two days? Or do you need longer?” She could make it two days. Much longer than that and she was afraid that whatever Unifier had in mind next might really start to break her.

Whirl straightened, towering over her at his full height. “Let’s say two days.”

**

Two days later, Whirl and Cyclonus crowded into Lug and Anode’s room. The bomb was safely tucked away in one of Lug’s pockets. Anode and Lug stood by the door where the drone would see them, and Whirl and Cyclonus tucked themselves into opposite corners, where the drone’s sensors wouldn’t notice unless it actually entered the room, which it hadn’t bothered to do for days.

The drone came. Anode and Lug marched out as usual, Anode keeping her eyes on the hallway in front of her. She was careful to suppress her smile as she heard the door shut not with its usual hiss, but with the light clink of metal hitting metal – Whirl’s claw.

She counted the seconds – they had agreed on sixty, based on some scouting that Anode had gotten Lug to participate in, because that was how long it took to get to the access point. They wanted to be as close to it as possible when they disabled the drone so that they could do that and set the bomb up in quick succession.

Anode was careful not to react as she heard footsteps come quiet but fast down the hall, and the drone didn’t seem to notice anything was amiss until Whirl and Cyclonus were practically on top of them. Whirl had the drone on the floor and was hitting it with a claw as soon as Anode turned around. Anode grabbed Lug and threw herself in front of her as the other two worked.

From the floor, the drone shot something at Whirl. He screeched and lost his grip, stumbling back and crashing to the floor. The drone spun in a pitiful circle on the ground, but before it could do anything else, Cyclonus crushed it underfoot until it sparked.

Cyclonus flung himself over to Whirl, who, it seemed, was prepared for this. He reached out a claw to forestall Cyclonus as he tried to hover at Whirl’s side.

Anode turned away, figuring it wasn’t her place to see anything that happened after that. And the clock was ticking for Unifier to retaliate. She held out her hand to Lug. The drone was down. She couldn’t hear anyone coming. But she had no idea how long the respite would last.

Lug took out the bomb and handed it over with care. She winced when Anode snatched it and tossed it on the ground. It was stable until the system was sufficiently heated, Anode knew, but she supposed that most people would be careful with bombs of any stage. She used her deep-wired tools to open the grate and placed the bomb inside, starting a fire at the end of a twisted bundle of wire with her finger.

“We have to go,” Anode said, turning back to Cyclonus, who had a hand pressed against a leaking wound in Whirl’s side. Cyclonus nodded and in one smooth motion, scooped Whirl into his arms, ignoring Whirl’s weak laugh.

Anode led the way back toward the cells they’d been in. They were in the hallway still when the bomb went off. The explosion, expected as it may have been, took her by surprise and she felt her systems jolt as the lights went out. She flicked on her headlights and tried to continue as if it hadn’t spooked her. But of course there was no use pretending. Lug’s hand found hers as they reached the door to their cell, which was now being held open by the wall panel that Whirl had removed. Anode tried to shove the door aside herself, but Cyclonus had to put one hand on the frame before it gave and retracted into the wall.

“I have field patches,” Lug offered as soon as Anode had snatched the tile away to make sure the door shut behind them. Cyclonus was laying Whirl on the cell floor. Whirl’s wiry arms were pressed awkwardly over the wound.

“Thank you,” said Cyclonus. Lug reached into a compartment. Anode couldn’t help but tap her foot impatiently, every instinct she’d developed screaming at her to go.

To Cyclonus’s credit, it didn’t take him long to get Whirl’s side to stop actively leaking. Whirl stood on his own shaky legs, and finally they were ready to move forward.

Anode took the tile and used it as a step to get herself onto the tiny perch between hers and Whirl’s cells. She offered Lug a hand and Lug climbed up after her. Anode dropped to the other side and Lug followed suit. From behind, she heard Cyclonus quietly insisting that Whirl go before him.

In the back wall of Whirl’s room was a familiar hole scraped out of the wall by brute force. It led to a chute that Anode had already snuck down once to ensure that it led to the level Whirl had described with the two doors and then the shuttle bay.

Anode checked to make sure that they were all in the room and took a step forward. She overbalanced and had to flare her wings out to stay upright. “Gravity’s going out,” she said, adjusting to the difference and taking another step forward. That would make the climb down go easier, at least.

Without hesitating, she climbed down the shaft to peer through the grate on the other side. Like she’d hoped, the red light indicating a camera that had been at the shuttle bay’s outer door last time she’d done this had disappeared, leaving Anode free to kick the grate out of place and step into the hallway, freeing up the bottom of the chute for others to follow her.

Lug came next, landing clumsily and visibly releasing tension from her frame when she laid optics on Anode. Anode reached forward to help her out of the shaft, and kept their hands joined as Whirl and then Cyclonus followed.

“Let’s go,” she said, pushing the red button that the camera normally pointed at. The outer and inner doors both opened. She released the button to step forward and barely jerked out of the way of having her foot cut off as both of the doors slammed closed.

“Okay, we need to find a way to hold that down,” Anode said, casting her gaze around for something, anything to hold the button. The force that would be required and the indent of the button into the wall made it tricky, but there had to be something –

Anode was making her second desperate swiveling gaze when her optics were jerked toward movement. Two more of the repainted and apparently weaponized medical drones were racing toward them down the hallway, barely making noise as they moved. “Oh, fuck.”

A thud, then a hiss as the shuttle bay doors opened again. Anode turned her attention behind her, to where Cyclonus had slammed his fist down on the button.

“Go,” he growled, red optics flaring as he stared at Whirl.

“Oh,” Whirl said, optic moving toward the shuttle bay and then back to Cyclonus as the drones drew closer. “No. You’re more of an optimist than you’d like to think, if you believe I could make it out there without you.”

He reached a claw over to push on Anode’s shoulder insistently. “You. Go.”

“But –” Anode didn’t have time for a full protest before she was picked up and thrown through both doors, scrambling to her feet in the shuttle bay just in time to catch Lug as she was thrown after her. The doors hissed closed. There was no button, nothing on this side that indicated they could be opened again. Still… “We have to go back.”

“No.” Lug’s grip was tight on Anode’s wrist. “We owe it to them to get out of here. It’s what they wanted.”

Anode’s spark felt torn in two as she let Lug drag her over to a row of ejection pods, listening to muffled shouts from outside the shuttle bay.

“Shit,” she heard Lug mumble while she was distracted by the door.

She turned her attention back toward Lug, who sidestepped a little closer to the nearest pod. “What?”

“Never mind,” Lug said. “Get in, we don’t have all day.”

Numb enough to be grateful for instructions of any sort, Anode complied. “We should share – we’re small enough, and we don’t know that two of them will land together,” she said, just as restraints activated to secure her limbs and torso in place. She jerked against them automatically.

Lug stepped forward and kissed Anode, pushing Anode’s shoulders back into the padded interior of the escape pod. “Mm – what are you doing? Get in here or get in the next one! We have to get out of here!”

Lug stepped back and Anode’s shoulders slumped in relief. But just for a moment, because she didn’t go over to the next escape pod. “These things are activated from the outside,” Lug says. “There’s a control panel out here.”

Anode strained her neck cables, and sure enough, Lug was right. Lug was, she thought through a flare of panic, generally right.

“It’s one of us or none of us,” Lug said.

“Then none! I’m not going without you!” Anode strained against the restraints, but they didn’t budge.

“You’re going to get yourself killed in here,” Lug said, stepping forward again toward the control panel. “And I couldn’t live with that. I know you’ll survive down there. I’ll get out of here, and I’ll find you. I promise.”

“Lug, no!” Anode’s optics were blurry but she blinked the fluid back as best she could – maybe pretending to be reasonable would be what worked here? “Lug, please!”

“I love you,” Lug said, and she pushed a button that sent a transparent screen rising over Anode’s head, cutting her off from the shuttle bay.

“Lug!” she yelled one last time, just in case it would make her change her mind. But Lug just looked at her, expression tight. The transparent barrier sealed just as Anode saw the door into the shuttle bay open. “I love you,” she yelled, even though she knew that Lug wouldn’t be able to hear her through the spaceworthy pod. And then it ejected, ripping away the image of Lug in the shuttle bay and casting Anode out into the yawning maw of empty space.


	7. Chapter 7

Lug turned away from the blank space where the escape pod had used to be, hoping that she hadn’t just gotten herself killed.

One of the drones zoomed through the door and Lug raised her hands to show that she wasn’t a threat.

The drone seemed to agree. “Come,” said the filtered version of Unifier’s voice. The doors opened for the drone with no need for the buttons.

Whirl and Cyclonus were already gone by the time she reached the spot where Lug and Anode had left them, nothing but a splatter of energon on the floor indicating that they had ever been here. Something lodged in Lug’s intake at the thought of what might have happened to them. What might happen to Anode, what might happen to her.

The drone didn’t take her back to her cell. It took her down a long hallway on the level they’d tried to escape from and then up an elevator that brought them to the more familiar level of the ship just outside Unifier’s door.

It was a lot of effort to go to, if Unifier was going to kill her. But Lug knew well that there were other things to be afraid of.

Gravity was back, she noticed dully as she stepped into Unifier’s room, the motion physically the same as every other time. They must have fixed the pitiful little hole that Anode had blown in the system.

Anode. Was she still in space, alone and scared and angry? Or was she on Cybertron by now, alone and scared and angry and threatened? The thought made Lug want to not do this at all, to just lie down on the floor in this awful room on this awful ship surrounding this awful planet and stay there until circumstances changed.

She spat out some energon that had settled in her mouth from a line she’d bitten at some point and squared her shoulders to face the wall.

“Backpack,” Unifier said. “I brought you here so that I could congratulate you for acting in accordance with your function.”

Lug blinked, sure that her processor had just glitched. “What?”

“I said: I brought you here so that I could congratulate you for acting in accordance with your function.”

“Okay, I believe that you said that,” Lug said. “But…could you explain?” This had to be some sort of joke. Engaging with Unifier by fronting her genuine curiosities had worked before, so it was what Lug defaulted to.

“You ought to understand my meaning based on previous sessions,” Unifier said. “Answer the question yourself or face consequences.”

Lug was too tired, too shocked, to come up with anything. “I accept the consequence.”

“If you respond correctly to the following three prompts, I will refrain from punishing you,” Unifier said. “State your function.”

Lug was tempted not to, but she knew that at this point her refusal would make things worse. “Backpack,” she said.

“Elaborate.”

“My alt mode is an immobile receptacle for inanimate objects of various shapes and sizes that are convenient but not required for Functionist life,” Lug said. Unifier had made her state this so many times that she suspected she could do it in her sleep.

“State one characteristic unique to your alt mode.”

There were a few, but Lug defaulted to her favorite. “My alt mode is optimally functional when I work in conjunction with another Cybertronian.” She considered that for a moment. “Wait, are you…are you congratulating me because I helped Anode?”

“I am congratulating you for acting in accordance with your function. Your understanding of your alt mode’s strengths, limitations, and function has clearly evolved, despite the Blacksmith’s perturbing influence.”

Lug blinked a few more times, but this appeared to really be happening. Apparently this one thing, surviving this rotten day, really would be that easy. “Okay. Can I go back to my room now?”

“There is one more point that needs to be addressed,” said Unifier. “Do you consider yourself to have a _conjunx endura_?”

Lug knew that she should lie. That Anode would tell her to lie, if it let her avoid the pain that was surely coming if she replied in the affirmative. But she’d sacrificed too much today already. She had a conjunx endura, and even when Anode was being annoying, even when Lug was afraid for both their lives because of her, she was, more than anything else, what Lug lived for, worked for, grew for. She couldn’t bear to even pretend to have given that up. Especially not now, with Anode far away and out of reach.

“I do,” she said.

“Functionist philosophy does not acknowledge the existence of such kinship.”

“I know.”

Unifier didn’t respond. Lug cringed as the familiar manacles locked around her feet. She sank back until she was seated on the floor and watched the needle come out of the floor, pierce through her plating, and inject something into her leg.

Lug woke up in a panic. Her frame was shaking uncontrollably and she didn’t understand why. There was some instinct telling her to curl up and go back to sleep, but something was desperately wrong, and she fought it.

She was able to identify cold as the feeling that was wrong a few seconds later. It was cold, and Lug was on a tiny ship alone, far from any civilized planet. The ship was insulated. It wasn’t supposed to be cold.

Her frame protested, frozen joints scraping painfully as she stood, fear clambering at her mind, telling her both to do something and to hide until whatever was going on was over. She knew that she couldn’t listen to the latter. There was no one else around to fix whatever was broken – just Lug, alone in the vast emptiness of space.

Pushing through the discomfort, Lug opened the door to the ship’s tiny berthroom. The source of the problem was obvious immediately: in the back corner of the piloting area, a pipe had burst, filling the area with ice and frost.

Fixing it was difficult, miserable work. Her body had shut down some peripheral fuel lines in response to the cold, making her fingers clumsy. The pipe was also just too tall for her to reach, forcing her to drag in some boxes from the cargo hold to precariously stand on – and, twice, fall painfully from – to access it well enough to clear away the ice and surround the hole with sealant. She finally managed that and fell again as she stumbled down from her tower of boxes. She punched in the code for a system reboot on the main terminal and then let herself collapse to the ground and shiver as the ship started to warm again by degrees.

The shivering abated and the discomfort waned as the ship rewarmed, but the loneliness remained a crystal shard digging into her spark chamber. Lug had survived. But if she hadn’t woken up, or if the pipe had proven unfixable, she would likely have died out here, stranded between planets by herself. For the first time since leaving Caminus, she let herself miss Anode. Anode, who would have joked about the cold the whole time they were fixing the pipe, who would have made quick work of the issue and wouldn’t have needed to stand on boxes to do it. Lug couldn’t help but think that while Anode was gone, something like this would happen again and again and again, and Lug would have to face it all alone. The proposition was so much more terrifying now.

It was hours before Lug got up off the floor.

Lug blinked her eyes open. What? She’d been on the shuttle – what had –

All at once, she remembered Luna 2, the Functionists, the past thousand years since that particular incident. It wasn’t as calming as she would have hoped. Something about the memory stayed with her, lingering in her frame and at the edges of her vision. Not without reason, Lug supposed. She was, again, alone.

“You think you love her.” Unifier’s familiar grating voice was less accusatory than Lug expected. Instead, it sounded perplexed.

Lug didn’t respond. It wasn’t like she’d been asked a question.

“We’ll work on that,” Unifier said, and the manacles holding Lug’s feet to the ground reopened.

Lug wanted to walk up to the wall and punch it, wanted to destroy everything and everyone that had brought her to this moment, stranded on a prison ship by herself. Everything but her own choice to get Anode out. She still intended to follow, someday, somehow, whatever it took. Lug turned to the entrance and let the drone take her back to her cell.

She wondered whether Cyclonus and Whirl were back, but she wasn’t tall enough to move the panel connecting hers and Whirl’s rooms by herself. She knocked instead, then stepped back.

There was a shuffle on the other side of the window, and after a few seconds, the panel slid away. Lug stepped back in surprise when it was Cyclonus’s face instead of Whirl’s that she saw.

“Cyclonus.” She hadn’t talked to him much – the strange friendship that Anode and Whirl had seemed to strike up had provided the bulk of the connection between the four of them. Lug remembered the last time she had seen Whirl, bleeding through a hastily applied bandage outside the shuttle bay. “Is he alright?”

“He’s being punished,” Cyclonus said. “I don’t know what she does to him anymore. He’s stopped talking about it.”

Lug nodded. She had worried upon not seeing Whirl in his cell, but Cyclonus seemed more despairing than concerned. “I’m sorry it didn’t work,” she said, because Anode wasn’t around to.

“As am I,” said Cyclonus. “But you ought to understand that you bear no responsibility. We entered a fight and we lost.”

Lug shifted her glance to the side. Some of them had lost more than others.

“What happened to Anode?” Cyclonus asked after a moment.

Lug explained about the safety lock on the shuttle, keeping her gaze on the wall the whole time. “She would have gotten herself killed in here. It was the only choice I had.”

“We don’t get to die,” Cyclonus said. Lug finally looked up at him, confused. “As Whirl laments. She doesn’t kill us and refuses to let us kill ourselves. But she can still make us want that. Perhaps that’s worse. I would have made the same choice.”

The reassurance from Cyclonus released tension that Lug hadn’t realized she was holding. “Thank you,” she said. “I hope Whirl’s okay.”

“Whirl is assuredly not okay,” Cyclonus said. “But he will endure. All of us will.”

“I think the best option right now is to try to get through the program,” Lug said. “Nod along, pass the exams, and eventually get sent down to the planet where we’ll have a little bit more freedom, at least.”

“I wish you the best, and I will not be following your lead.”

“Why not? Do you have a better idea?”

Cyclonus slowly shook his head. “I do not expect to ever leave this place. I will not compromise my principles for the sake of my freedom, no matter what they ask of me.” He paused, turning his own gaze away for a moment. “And Whirl, like, I suspect, Anode, would never manage it. I can’t leave him alone.”

“I wish the best for you too,” Lug said. “And…thank you for making sure I could at least get Anode out.”

“As I said, I will not compromise my principles for these people,” said Cyclonus.

“If I’m going to do this and try to mean it, we probably shouldn’t speak again,” Lug said. “But if you need anything from me, just say the word.”

Cyclonus nodded in acknowledgement and hefted the square of tile back up between Lug and Whirl’s rooms. “Rest well, Lug.”

That was the last time anyone called Lug by her name for a long time.


	8. Chapter 8

The pod opened as soon as the pressure equalized with the atmosphere around it, but Anode, for the first few seconds, stayed where she was. The heavy atmosphere lit up sensors that she’d nearly forgotten about in the low-quality filtered air in the station, convincing her more and more that this was really the surface. This really was Cybertron.

And Lug wasn’t here. Anode took an experimental vent, opening up systems that had safety sealed during reentry, and almost wished that she hadn’t. She could have stayed in the moment she’d landed forever, waiting to wake up from some wild recharge feedback after a night of drinking, assured that this whole mess had never really happened.

But now her systems were insisting on venting in and out, and she couldn’t help but experience the passage of time. Still, though, she stayed in her pod until a light shone in from above, nearly shorting out delicate optical circuitry.

“State your designation and function,” a monotone voice said. Anode blinked away the initial shock from the light and saw around it to the flat-faced mech facing her.

Anode idly considered pretending to be dead, but supposed she’d already given herself away by having her optics on. “Fuck you,” she decided on, reflecting as she said it that that particular turn of phrase hadn’t exactly gone wonderfully for her back on the station.

“Designation and function,” the mech said again, voice now canted to dangerous. Or maybe the voice was the same, and Anode was just ascribing it the danger she intuited from the laser rifle she heard charging up in front of her.

Anode might have wanted to die when the pod had first opened, but faced with death in physical form in front of her, she decided that now wasn’t the time. She flung herself out of the pod and punched the mech across his flat, boring face.

It hurt. She suspected she’d dislodged something in her hand, but she powered through it to kick the laser rifle away from the bot. With her other hand, she picked up the gun and pointed it at him.

“Anode,” she said. “Adventurer.” She lined up the shot and took it, aiming for the mech’s knee and shooting true. She turned and ran as he fell with a cry.

She could see a city in the distance, far enough away that it was little more than a barely differentiated glow on the horizon. In the other direction there was nothing. People were dangerous, but people were also where the energon would be. She dropped the gun, transformed, and took off toward the city.

From a distance, Cybertron didn’t seem to have changed much. The buildings here were about as tall as she remembered, the city unplanned and busy from the way it had spread as Cybertron’s population had grown. About halfway there, things started to change. The outskirts of the city, Anode could tell, were dark. Light still blazed from the taller buildings, but the people inhabiting the city didn’t seem to come close to filling it.

_Maybe everyone else left too_, she thought as she glided over the outskirts. She landed on the first street she saw that was long enough and empty enough to serve as a proper runway.

No one paid any particular attention to her as she coasted to a stop and transformed to root. That was good – hopefully she’d be able to disappear into a crowd if someone tried to arrest her on sight. She looked around to see if anyone looked particularly friendly, or, on an off chance, familiar.

There was one person approaching her, a fellow flier with a frown on – her? Looked like _her_ face.

The stranger stopped right in front of Anode, who tensed to flee. “Welcome,” she said, and given Unifier’s paradoxical friendliness, Anode didn’t relax an inch. “Are you here alone?”

“What makes you think that’s any of your business?” Anode asked, before she remembered that she’d been looking for help.

“Don’t worry,” the stranger said. “I’m with the AVL.”

“The what?”

“The AVL.” At Anode’s lack of recognition, the stranger expanded, “Anti-Vocationist League.” She waited a few more moments. “You don’t know us?”

“I haven’t set foot on this planet in hundreds of years,” Anode said, because it was going to become obvious at some point.

The stranger’s optics widened. “Then how did you get here?”

Anode crossed her arms. “Accident.”

The stranger seemed to read something from her and left it at that. “Well, you’re free to stay in Adaptica regardless,” she said. “This is a sanctuary for all. But if you want to learn more about the AVL and this planet, you can come with me.”

Go get some more information, or fend for herself among strangers in this strange place? Easy choice. “Lead the way.”

“I’m Slipstream.” Slipstream waved Anode after her as she started down the street.

Anode reluctantly introduced herself and followed Slipstream through the city. Being on Cybertron again was strange. Strange to be surrounded by people who looked sort of like her, strange to be so immediately used to the familiar smooth walkways and architecture. Being on Cybertron was strange, but being on Cybertron without Lug felt like having a limb missing, so Anode tried not to think about it too much.

Slipstream led her into a building at the center of the city. The lobby was the most crowded place Anode had seen yet, full of mechs filling out forms on datapads, talking to people with badges and styluses who looked like they were there on official business, and more mechs trying to get the official mechs’ attention.

“What’s going on here?” Anode asked as Slipstream led her into a hallway past it all.

“Registering their refugee status with the government,” Slipstream said. “Some think it’ll sway the Functionists’ minds, some just want their friends and endurae to know that they’re safe. We got an influx tonight, and probably more tomorrow – they’re doing a recall on ocean vehicles, because Cybertron doesn’t have natural oceans.”

“A recall?” Anode parroted.

Slipstream just glanced back at her, a darkness in her eyes that made Anode decide to shut up for now.

Slipstream opened a door to a room off the hallway, catching the attention of both mechs inside. “This is Anode,” Slipstream said. “Says she came here from outer space.”

The laser pointer jolted, and the empuratee just nodded. “Thank you, Slipstream,” the latter said. He turned to Anode. “I am very interested to hear your story.”

“I’m headed back out. I heard that there’s another group coming from Sol that’ll make it here by morning,” Slipstream said. “If any agents aren’t already working, you might want to wake them up.”

“Thanks, Slipstream, I will,” the laser pointer said, his voice reedy but authoritative. Slipstream acknowledged Anode with a wave as she left.

“Anode, it was?”

“That’s me.” Anode lingered near the door, which Slipstream had shut behind her. Making a break for it still wasn’t out of the question. The vitriol with which Slipstream had talked about the Functionists was promising, but Anode didn’t really know her. Nothing here was safe. Nothing here could be trusted.

“I am Nine-of-Twelve, Prolocutor for this city, and this is Clicker. Outer space?” Nine-of-Twelve’s voice held more than simple curiosity. It held something that Anode recognized in herself as a treasure hunter – opportunity. There was possibility in her story that this mech hoped to pounce on.

“I came here from orbit, actually. I was captured on Luna 2 and taken to a ship that orbits the planet about two weeks ago. I managed to get on an escape pod, and I landed in the desert nearby.” She left Lug out of her words intentionally – she still didn’t trust these people, and she certainly didn’t trust herself to say her conjunx’s name without all the shame and despair boiling inside her showing up in her expression. 

“Oh.” Nine-of-Twelve looked downwards, slowly crossing something off on a datapad.

“Sorry to disappoint,” Anode said as obnoxiously as she could manage. Were they just going to turn her out now? What a waste of time.

“No, I’m sorry,” he said, lifting his optic back towards Anode. “I must admit that I was hoping for you to know of some method of space travel that would be available for us to use. It appears we have to keep searching.”

“It’s incredible that you got off that ship at all,” Clicker said. “As far as we know, no one ever has before.”

“Thanks,” Anode said, hoping that her voice was clipped enough that they wouldn’t press her for details. They gave her enough time to follow it up with a question of her own. “What’s the AVL?”

Clicker started to explain. He asked how much she knew about Functionism, and she answered. He talked and talked about rights and resistance, sacred places and defenses, and eventually, Anode sat down.

**

There was a knock on Anode’s door before she managed to lie down on the berth and pass out.

She opened the door without looking to see who it might be. If whoever was outside was here to kill her, they could at least hurry it up so that she could get to sleep.

The mech who stood outside her door was about Anode’s height, maybe a little shorter. He carried a box with a familiar medical symbol on it, and his frame was painted in red and white.

“Hi Anode,” he said. “My name is First Aid.”

“Excuse me?”

First Aid’s faceplate moved in an approximation of a frown. “Are you having problems hearing?”

“Not at all. That’s really your –” Lug would have stopped her with an elbow in the side before she’d even gotten that much out. As things were, Anode had to choke on the rest of her obnoxious comment about the uncreative name of the mech who was clearly here to help her. She gestured to him to continue.

“Clicker mentioned that you were in an altercation with a Functionist patroller earlier,” First Aid said. “I’m just here to check if you made it out alright.”

Anode opened the door further and crossed to the berth, the only seating in the tiny room. “Actually, I think I messed up my hand,” she said. “It’s super lame, especially to you badass revolutionaries, but I wasn’t made for punching.”

“_Made for_ is the kind of talk that the AVL isn’t a big fan of, for future reference,” First Aid said, kneeling in front of her and opening up the medical kit on the floor. She proffered her hand to him when he reached for it. “But I understand what you mean. Wow! You’ve got a lot of delicate circuitry in here.”

“And not as hardy as medics’ tools, I’ve been told.”

First Aid examined her hand for a little longer and then his optics flashed with recognition. “You’re a blacksmith!”

“I could be a blacksmith if I wanted to be,” Anode corrected.

First Aid nodded and reached for a tool from his kit. “Forget what I said. You’ll fit right in here. But…do you understand what that means? How long have you been away from Cybertron?”

“I left for good when the Primal Vanguard was recalled,” Anode said. “It might not have been for the final time, I suppose – news from Cybertron after we left was spotty at best. It was right after the altercation with Aria Nova.”

“That was the final time,” First Aid said. “And a good time to go.”

He worked in silence for a bit, then placed a patch over the damaged plating and repacked his tools. “I’ll keep what you can do between us,” he said.

“If it’s important for the others to know, they can know,” Anode said. “Why is it so important?”

“Blacksmiths are one of the rarest and most valued functions in the taxonomy. If the people knew one of you had joined our ranks, it could make people reconsider their own place.”

“So you wouldn’t expect me to do any blacksmithing?” Anode shivered to bury the too-recent memory of too-cold sentio metallico slipping through her fingers.

“No one’s harvested a spark on Cybertron since before the Functionists took over,” First Aid said. “So I don’t think you need to worry about that.”

“Well, if you want me on a poster or whatever…” Anode opened up her deep-wired tools and waggled them in the air. “I’ll help. Whatever you need me to say.” If she had no other way of getting to Lug other than destroying the Functionists, then she was going to destroy the Functionists.

“You’ll absolutely fit in here,” said First Aid as he stood to go. “Pleasure to meet you, Anode.”

“You too,” Anode said weakly. Finally, the door to her underground room was shut, leaving her to sleep alone.


	9. Chapter 9

The drone came for Lug at the same time every day. It didn’t bother to speak anymore, because she complied with its wishes without them needing to. It led her to the Reeducation Room and let her walk herself in.

The lessons were easy now, and Lug was advancing quickly. She sat herself cross-legged on the floor and absorbed whatever Unifier wanted to teach her. Even the most reprehensible parts of it – the recalls, the caste system, the renaming of everything for enhanced religious symbolism – she accepted uncritically, for now. For now, the only thing that mattered was saying whatever she had to say to make it back to Anode, and then when they were together, they could get away from this planet forever.

Today, Unifier didn’t try to teach Lug anything new. She grilled Lug on the Grand Cybertronian Taxonomy. Lug finished the quiz feeling as though she’d done well, and she relaxed a little when Unifier projected her high score onto the screen.

“Your aptitude for the information that guides Functionist society is excellent. Your acceptance of the conditions of Functionist Society, including renouncing the concept of elective kinship, has also progressed to an acceptable level. It is time to begin the next stage of Reeducation.”

“Job training,” Lug finished, trying not to let on that even the mention of endurae, the reminder of Anode that it represented, was like a stab in her spark. It was just words, she reminded herself. Whatever she needed to say to get herself free.

“Correct. And as we’ve discussed, you’ve engaged in alt mode-appropriate work previously. This stage of training should not take long.”

“How long is not long?” Lug tried to keep her skepticism out of her voice, but it had been nearly a year since she’d come here, and Unifier didn’t seem to have any sense of urgency.

“Three to six sessions, as determined by pre-test performance.”

Three days. Lug’s spark flooded with a hope she hadn’t allowed herself to feel since she’d helped Anode escape. She was so close. It was going to be okay.

**

Lug was startled awake by the sound of gunfire. She jumped out of her berth, ready to flee, and stayed standing even after she realized that the cell door was closed and she couldn’t do anything.

The gunfire stopped after a minute and Lug heard someone run past her door. She stood with her back pressed against the back wall of the cell, wary and sick at being alone for this. She knew that she could knock on Whirl’s wall and he would move the tile aside, but she hadn’t so far, and Unifier would probably have a way to find out, and she was so close –

It took her a moment to realize that things had quieted. The hallway was as silent as ever.

Lug sat back on the berth, curling her legs in front of her as she kept her optics on the door. That couldn’t have been Cyclonus and Whirl – right? She tried to keep herself from imagining the logical conclusion of the possibility – that she could have been with them. That maybe, somehow, they could have succeeded.

She resisted the urge to check, counting seconds in the hopes that it would help her fall back into recharge. It didn’t. She wrapped her arms around herself and tried to imagine that Anode was sitting on the berth across from her. She wouldn’t be, if she were here. She would have Lug cradled protectively against her, talking nonsense plans until the false bravado made Lug laugh.

Lug stayed awake long enough to hear the door of the cell next to her open. Not Whirl’s. The other side.

She jolted her optics to the side, even though there was a solid wall between her and the next cell. The door closed, and she heard something that sounded like a person hitting the cell door in frustration.

New neighbor.

If Lug escaped – graduated – what would happen to this stranger? They hadn’t complied even a little bit at being taken here – they’d been shot at. Maybe they were hurt – the mechs here hadn’t treated Anode’s injuries properly when she and Lug had gotten here.

Maybe Unifier would excuse it. After all, Lug’s function was to help. She got out her drill and set about carving a hole through the grout.

Once she had broken through to the other side, she stepped up to the tiny hole. “Hello?”

“Hello?” The newcomer’s voice was rich and warm, threaded with anxiety. Lug remembered the first time Whirl had smashed into her cell and smiled because no one could see it.

“My name is Lug. I’ve been here awhile. I just want to find out if you’re alright,” Lug said.

“I don’t know that I’d admit to being alright, but I appreciate the sentiment. Orion Pax.”

“These tiles aren’t very secure. My – the person on the other side from me knows how to break through them,” Lug offered, stumbling over calling Whirl her friend. She hadn’t earned that, especially not recently.

“In that case, let me try. Stand back,” Orion Pax said.

Lug stepped over to the other side of her cell, and it only took a few hits from Orion’s side for the tile to crash to the ground. Orion was about three times as tall as Lug, with broad shoulders and blue optics. He knelt down on his side of the cell when he got a look at Lug.

“Are you hurt?” Lug asked, as an explanation for her behavior that she could feed Unifier later, and also because she wanted to know.

“No,” Orion Pax said. “Just…demoralized. I didn’t expect to be captured here.”

“None of us expected it,” Lug said, even though it would probably come as cold comfort.

“You were snatched and taken here, correct?”

“Close enough.”

Orion averted his optics. “I came here on purpose. I was on my way back from a long diplomatic mission that went wrong – long story – and I got in contact with the resistance on the ground. They’re making moves against the government down there, but the one thing they desperately need is a spaceworthy vessel. This is the only one in this region of space. I had one chance to take it. I thought I could surprise them and commandeer it but the security must be better than I thought. Better than makes sense.”

“Wait – they don’t have spaceworthy vessels on the planet? The resistance _or_ the Functionists?” That question overtook the excited _there’s a resistance?!_ that half of her processor was still stuck on.

“The Functionists have some short-range craft, and this one, which they could use to hurt the resistance at any point. Or they could turn it away and leave Cybertron without any outside contact. They needed this.” Orion rubbed a hand over his face in frustration.

“They still need it,” Lug said. Orion looked at her askance, and then nodded, and Lug felt herself make a decision.

If she got down to the planet Unifier’s way, she wouldn’t be able to get off of it. Anode saying “_live in function-dictated hell forever_” reverberated through her processor. It wouldn’t help anything if she got down there. But this ship? It had shuttles, it was spaceworthy, and it had at least four people on it determined to get out and who’d learned from their respective last tries.

Lug had learned enough about Functionism to know that she didn’t want any part in it. She wanted to leave.

“There wasn’t a Plan B,” Orion said. “I was their last chance.”

“I want you to meet my friends,” said Lug. She walked over to the opposite wall and rapped on the tile between her cell and Whirl’s, hard enough to dent her fingers a little.

Whirl responded in seconds, and Lug barely had time to step back before the tile was coming off and crashing into her space. “Howdy, Whirl,” she said, watching as Whirl’s optic took in the scene. “This is Orion Pax. It’s time for Attempt Thirteen.”

**

The four of them sat in a circle in Lug’s cell and talked for hours. Lug was surprised that the drone didn’t notice the dust left over from the ruined grouting that coated the floor of her cell in the morning. It didn’t say a word as she walked out of her cell, as usual, and she didn’t say anything either as she was marched to Unifier’s room.

She tried to keep herself from tensing up as she neared the chamber, but a lot rode on this session. If Unifier knew about last night, the plan would fail before she even had a chance to test her theory.

There was no one on the ship, Lug was nearly certain, except the four prisoners and whatever Unifier was. One enemy was better than dozens, especially since Lug suspected she’d grown close enough to find her weak points.

“Welcome, Backpack,” Unifier said in the same warm monotone as ever. Lug didn’t drop her guard a fraction, not until she started in on the day’s lesson without any indication that something was amiss. Lug passed the evaluation quickly, and Unifier confirmed that the training would only take three further sessions.

Three days. It was a timer on a bomb now – three days until the possibility of getting this ship to the resistance on Cybertron was entirely out of her hands.

“I had a question for you,” Lug said, near the end of the day’s lesson. She didn’t wait for acknowledgement. “If everything that is needed is born, why do you exist?”

“I am not needed,” Unifier said. “In the Functionist utopia that the Council is working towards, I will not exist.”

“When you say I, do you mean your consciousness, or the whole ship?”

“I refer to the AI core that will be shut down when utopia arrives,” said Unifier. “But the ship will be destroyed as well, as it is functionless.”

“So do you pilot the ship?” Lug asked.

“Yes. Pilot is not an inborn Cybertronian function, and asking a citizen of Cybertron to learn a skill antithetical to their function would be cruel.”

It was only through having lots of practice that Lug managed to not roll her eyes at that one. “Do you communicate with the Functionist Council about our progress, or do they not care?” she asked, leaning into her actual curiosity on the subject to keep her questions from being too suspicious.

“I personally communicate with them each solar cycle.”

“So do you have a comm system like a Cybertronian?”

Unifier hesitated. It was brief, but after all this time Lug had spent talking to her, she noticed. When she answered, what she said wasn’t an answer at all. “If I was necessary, I would have been born.”


	10. Chapter 10

“In many ways, Mortilia is the ideological center of the Functionist Empire. Its smelters break down the bodies of murdered Cybertronians in order to harvest fuel. The energy cost of producing fuel this way would be prohibitive if their regime had a less monstrous body count. But they do produce fuel, so the Functionists can recursively pretend that the deaths they’re mandating are meaningful. That is, they could – until today. Today, we shut down the smelters, and we free Mortilia from tyranny.”

Anode stood at the back of the room, observing Megatron as he spoke. She had been grudgingly impressed with Megatron after he’d taken the lead in the fight over Adaptica. Since then, he’d proposed ever grander plans and pulled off all of them. If not for his record, Anode would have bet a _lot _of money against today’s plan working.

Anode was listening and following along, but unlike many here, she’d been in the meetings as they’d planned this attack. She was only here in solidarity with the soldiers who were hearing it for the first time – including her commanding officer for the day, Starscream. He’d been expressing enthusiastic interest in leadership ever since he’d made his way to Adaptica, and they were short enough on fliers with battle experience that Megatron had finally granted it. He and Thundercracker would be leading separate squads into the city while the rest of the AVL fought for the city gate.

They were really going after Mortilia because it was close to Adaptica and, in the scheme of things, lightly guarded, not because it was “the ideological center of the Functionist Empire”. But Anode suspected that the dozens of civilians-turned footsoldiers sitting at rapt attention as Megatron spoke didn’t particularly care.

“The majority of our forces will be clustered at the city gate, along with most of our heavy weaponry,” Megatron said. “We will fight hard, but after our initial attack, we will be fighting defensively. Our goal is to maintain a steady threat to the city and distract the Functionists’ security forces from the other prong of our attack. Flier squads will be entering the city from opposite the city gate with the goal of taking over the smelters.” Anode’s optics went to the twin rectangular blocks on the far east and west corners of the walled city. “The smelters are the most important strategic position. If they aren’t securely in hand, the Functionists will retreat there and wait for backup to arrive. There is no weapon we have access to that can destroy them, and no tenable length of siege could drive them out of the factories that produce energy for this half of the planet. Once we have the smelters, the city is won. The forces at the gate will fight to win, and once the Functionists hear that the smelters are ours, they’ll retreat.” That was almost certainly not what would happen, but Anode, Megatron, Terminus, Clicker, Nine, Starscream, and Thundercracker had discussed plenty of alternatives. “Today, we teach the people that there is no purpose to the bodies the Functionists drop on their own streets. We teach them that these obsolescence chips serve no function. If the Functionists want to keep killing their people, they’re going to have to watch their sins pile up on the streets. We will no longer accept the myth that some Cybertronians are superior, and some are disposable. Peace through empathy!”

“Peace through empathy!” the room rejoined, loudly enough that Anode startled at it.

People started to move, the speech obviously over, to group up with their squadrons and start assembling artillery. The attack on the gate was scheduled for four hours from now, at Mortilia’s sunrise. The city’s Prolocutor, Four-of-Twelve, was out of town at a Council meeting until three days from now, and this was the fourth such opportunity he’d given them – by Megatron’s reasoning, he would have stopped expecting them to take advantage of his absence by now.

Anode spotted Starscream’s head, visible over most of the crowd, and joined him as the soldiers streamed out of the room. She didn’t speak – she had never particularly liked Starscream, and wasn’t interested in hearing more of his opinions on what was about to happen. Anode would have tried to wriggle her way onto the other team if she hadn’t sensed that she was placed where she was as a check on Starscream’s power fantasies in the first place.

The two of them met up with the rest of the team that was set to go after the western smelter outside the briefing room. Then they walked to the back of the building, transformed, and flew an hour closer to Mortilia, where they would stay until Megatron gave the signal to go in.

_Dear Lug_, Anode composed in her head as she flew. _If you’re reading this, I am dead._ Anode wasn’t actually going to write this down, and even if she were so inclined, she knew full well that there was no way Lug could ever find it, but she had to pass the time somehow. _I’ve died valiantly in battle. Hopefully the AVL’s eleven other fliers managed to free the world from corpse juice without me_. Good thing she wasn’t really writing. It was really only Megatron out of all of them who had a way with words.

They settled in a clearing to wait, and instead of putting anyone on patrol, Starscream decided to give them a pep talk of his own. Anode was rethinking her assessment of her own oratory talents when he was done – if this was the baseline, maybe there was hope for her yet.

At the appointed time, the comms unit that Fireflight had been assigned to carry beeped with the signal to go. They lifted off in an agreed-upon formation, with Starscream probably very happy to be at the apex and Slipstream as rear guard. They sailed through billowing smoke from the smelters on their way into the city and landed on the roof of the smelter, Anode trying to keep from coughing as she transformed.

Fireflight and Silverbolt unloaded the parts of the massive laser-gun-turned-cutter and assembled it as efficiently as they’d practiced. Nimbus, Slipstream, and Anode took up positions to guard them while Starscream supervised, offering unneeded pointers whenever one of them hesitated over part of the complicated assembly.

The skies were clear. When Fireflight got the last part snapped into place, Anode heard an explosion in the distance.

According to an AVL member who had once worked here, the precise location where they were entering would lead to a ventilation shaft above the top floor. They would need to disable the guards outside the control room without being seen – ideally guard, singular, if the city put as much of their firepower towards the attack at the gate as Megatron hoped for – and steal their access card to get into the control room, where there should only be scientists who had never been trained to use a weapon.

Theoretically, taking the smelters was the easy part. But if it failed, the city was lost. It didn’t matter how easy it was – the stakes made any possibility of failure a living presence in Anode’s internals, steadying her hand as she gripped the weapon that she had so recently learned to use properly.

Anode had to give Starscream a little bit of grudging respect when he knocked out the one guard on the door with a single shot, clearing the way for the six of them to pile out of the ventilation shaft and get into formation to charge the command center.

“Hands in the air! This room is now property of the Anti-Vocationist League!” Starscream said as the six Cybertronians in the room, all intellectual-class, looked toward the door at once.

“Don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot!” one of them, a white frame that Anode recognized as a microscope said, flinging his hands into the air.

“Why would we have bothered telling you to put your hands up if all we wanted to do was shoot you?” Anode asked, walking up to him and digging out one of the pairs of inhibitor cuffs she carried. The microscope was trembling, but complied readily as Anode put him in the cuffs.

“Now,” Starscream said. “You’re going to show us how to shut this thing down.”

He lowered his eyes. “Start with the panel on the far right. Blue button.”

Anode nodded to Starscream who nodded to Fireflight who walked over to follow the instructions. Anode rolled her eyes. Naturally, fulfilling the actual outcome of their mission, while Anode stood over the prisoner, was somehow beneath him.

Fireflight followed the instructions that the bot in front of Anode delivered in a trembling voice, until Starscream said “No!” and Fireflight lifted his finger away from the panel as if he’d been burned.

Anode looked questioningly – and probably a little irritated – at Starscream, who had his optics fixed on one of the other two prisoners, who had been quiet this whole time. “You,” Starscream said. “You flinched when this one told my soldier to pull the black lever. Why?”

She winced. “That’s not the shutdown procedure. He’s telling him how to lock all of us in this room, where you’ll just kill us all.”

Maybe Starscream wasn’t a half-bad commander. He gestured for the second scientist to keep going and Fireflight followed her instructions. The vibration underfoot stopped as the smelter cycled down.

Starscream motioned to Fireflight, who handed him the comms unit. “This is Starscream with the western infiltration squad. We have shut down the western smelter and it is under our control.”

“Good.” Megatron’s voice was crackly through the lines. He cut out for a second, probably to talk or listen to someone else. “Hold position. Have you swept the building?”

“Not yet.”

“Exercise caution when you do.” Megatron cut the line.

Starscream looked frustrated somehow, maybe that Megatron hadn’t heaped praise on him for doing his job. “Who do you want here and sweeping, Commander?” Anode asked, throwing him a bone with the title. She barely swallowed the desire to dig into his frustration by calling him Screamer, which she’d called him once before he’d let on how much he hated it, and two or three times after.

“We’re not doing a sweep,” he said. “I’ve got a tabled message here that the eastern team is under fire. We’re going to go assist.”

“Let me see that,” Anode said, yanking the comm unit out of his hands before he could react to the very on-brand insubordination. That wasn’t what Megatron had said, and if Starscream knew the eastern team’s status, Megatron certainly did too. She scrolled through the message he’d been reading from. The eastern team were in the control room and under fire from security forces outside, apparently, but they were in literally one of the two safest rooms in the city and Megatron had already sent a team to back them up. She relayed the message word for word to the rest of the team over comms then looked back up at Starscream. “Absolutely not. You heard what Megatron said.”

“Megatron isn’t even from this planet. Those aren’t his brethren in there!”

“You’re defying orders because you think it’s going to get you into his good graces.”

“I’m defying orders because it’s the right thing to do, Anode.”

“Megaton said to secure the building. We haven’t done that.”

“We have the control room. That’s what counts.”

“So does the eastern team!”

“If we have to win this smelter back, we’ll win it back.”

“No we won’t! That’s why we’re doing it this way.” The rest of the fliers in the room were looking back and forth between the two of them as if they were unsure what to think. Technically, both of them were being insubordinate here, as Starscream defied Megatron’s orders and Anode defied Starscream. But…all of them had heard Megatron. Maybe not all of them knew Megatron well, but he’d gotten them this far, hadn’t he? She decided to take the risk. “If you want to be a big damn hero, you’re doing it alone. Right?” She made optic contact with Slipstream, who nodded, then Silverbolt, Fireflight, and Nimbus, who each mumbled “Right.”

“Your fragging loss,” Starscream said as he stalked out of the control room. After making sure the prisoners were still not trying anything with Silverbolt’s and Nimbus’s guns trained on them, Anode walked over to the room’s one window, which looked out over the rest of Mortilia. It was probably meant to show the scientists who worked in this terrible place the good things that they wrought – the smelting factories powered Mortilia and ten other cities; they powered people’s lives.

Now, the view out the window showed Starscream flying out over the city and immediately being shot at from somewhere below them. He was forced to veer off course to avoid the fire, and disappeared past the city limits, presumably to circle around and land on the roof of the eastern smelter, but for now, out of encrypted comms range.

Well then.

Anode turned to the rest of the squad. “Silverbolt and Fireflight, search the building for hostiles. Round them up and disarm them, as we discussed. Slipstream, stay here. Guard the outside of the door, stay in constant comms contact with Nimbus, and be prepared to assist Silverbolt and Fireflight should a situation arise. Nimbus, you’ll be here guarding the prisoners. I’ll be monitoring the smelter shutdown and awaiting further commands from Megatron. I’ll let all of you know if the situation changes.”

Silverbolt, Fireflight, and Slipstream all left the room without question. Anode debated how she would tell Megatron why she would now be showing up as the primary contact for their squadron on comms, and decided to leave it be for now. She’d tell him if he asked, but she suspected he had more urgent things to worry about.

A comm came in from an unfamiliar AVL frequency. Anode frowned, suspecting a trap, but answered. All they could get from that was her location, which her enemies already knew.

“Starscream? You there?” It took Anode a moment to place Impactor’s voice.

“This is Anode, formerly Starscream’s second, current field leader of Infiltration Beta,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“I’m leading the team that’s supposed to meet up with Infiltration Alpha. We’re in the sewer underneath the city. Megatron was giving us directions, but he’s not answering comms, and I don’t know who else he was working with. Got any idea what’s going on out there?”

“None,” Anode said, only knowing that Megatron had uncharacteristically failed to ask her yet about Starscream. She went over to an open computer terminal not occupied with shutting down the smelter and typed until she found a map of the city. “Send me your location.”

Impactor did, and he turned out to be only a few streets away from the smelter entrance. Anode managed to get him underneath it, to the entry point that Megatron had apparently relayed to them before they left.

While they cut their way through the floor to get into the sub-basement of the building, Anode received a comm from Fireflight. All clear down to the fifteenth floor, halfway from Anode, Slipstream, and Nimbus’s location. There had been a security officer guarding the lift and a squadron of them had caught up with him and Silverbolt but both had been easily dispatched.

Anode warned Impactor about the guard on the lift and sent Fireflight confirmation that she’d read his message. Then she sent a message to Megatron and an identical one to Clicker, opting for _??????_ instead of actual words.

Megatron didn’t reply, but Clicker got back to her within a few seconds. _Terminus is down. Spark injury, think he’s guttering. Megatron isn’t handling it. _

So they were on their own. Anode sent a message to Thundercracker, telling him to loop her in on any messages to High Command, hoping that he wouldn’t ask her why. As an afterthought, she copied in Fireflight, telling him to send the Alpha team instructions for shutting down the smelter. He sent over a confirmation.

_How are we doing at the gate?_ Anode asked Clicker.

Clicker took worryingly long to respond. Not _good. There are more of them mobilized than we expected. One of the proton cannons is down, and they’re focusing fire on the second._

Megatron had thought up a contingency plan for a situation exactly like this one, but it had depended on, ironically, Megatron. Starscream would have jumped at the chance to take his place, but he was still out of comms range. 

_Hold position_, she said to Clicker, then she queried Thundercracker for his team’s status. He could hear the security forces who had been bombarding the control room door exchanging fire now with Impactor’s crew outside.

Her spark rose to her intake during the silence that followed, but dropped again at Impactor’s _all clear_.

_Patch me through your emergency broadcast system_, she sent to Thundercracker, hoping that he wouldn’t question where the orders came from. She could defend her choice, but it wasn’t looking like the forces about to be overwhelmed at the gate had time for that.

Silverbolt sent her a comm declaring the facility cleared down to the ground level. Anode ordered him to keep watch over the prisoners they’d acquired. She pinged Megatron a few more times, to give him a chance to stop her from executing her plan if he was so inclined, but he still wasn’t responding.

Her next ping was from Thundercracker, telling her that the broadcast system on the eastern side was online and connected to her comm. Anode flicked on her own half and started to speak.

“People of Mortilia,” she started, because that sounded like something Megatron would say. Then she couldn’t come up with the rest of the sentence, so she decided to finish as herself. She heard her words reverberate from broadcast towers throughout the city. “This is the AVL. We’re here to boot the Functionists out of power so that each and every one of you listening to this can live your lives the way you want to, not the way twelve randos say you have to. If that’s what you want – for yourself, or even just for your friends – we could use your help at the city gate. If you’re at the gate, and you’re shooting at us, know that you can put your gun down. Think about what you want! Think about what you’d do if you were free!”

She stopped and listened. Thirty stories up, nothing seemed to change at first. But when she pinged Clicker, he simply redirected the line outward, so Anode could hear as the gunfire in the background slowed and then stopped.

They’d won.

**

“You commed?”

“Come in, Anode. Sit down.” Megatron was seated at a long, unadorned table, an unopened cube of energon in front of him.

Anode followed the instruction, studying Megatron as she sat across from him. He didn’t seem driven mad by grief, like some of the soldiers from the battle today had told her to expect. He seemed, if anything, distant.

“You performed admirably today,” he said, optics focusing a little off to the side of her as he did.

“I was in the right position to make the calls and I knew what to do,” Anode corrected.

“You led admirably.”

Anode narrowed her optics. She was beginning to suspect that this was a new iteration of a talk they’d had before.

“You could be of great service to the AVL as a field leader,” Megatron said.

“Thank you,” Anode said, like she’d said last time. “But no. I don’t want you relying on me. I’m not reliable. As soon as I get Lug back, we’re out of here.”

“Early reports are saying that we have enough recruits from Mortilia to double our forces,” Megatron said. “Enough that I’m going to need an Air Commander.”

“I recommend Thundercracker,” said Anode. “He performed admirably today as well.”

“But he didn’t step up and take over at a critical moment,” Megatron said. “And do you hear yourself? Giving me a recommendation for a promotion, reporting on his performance – you sound like a commander already. Why do you think we keep coming back here? I have plenty of competent fighters, plenty of people who are good at following orders. But you, Anode – you make decisions. You act, and react, and you refuse to always be looking over your shoulder as you do.”

“Not all the decisions I’ve made were good ones,” said Anode. She wanted to defy the logic of what she was saying, but it was hard to argue with the facts – she’d stepped up today, and if she hadn’t been there, she didn’t know that anyone else would have.

“That’s precisely why I think you’ll make a good commander,” Megatron said. “You know what it’s like to fail. You know that failure can be painful, but isn’t insurmountable.”

Abruptly, Anode was reminded that Megatron had lost a friend today. “Are you sure you want to be having this conversation right now?”

Now, Megatron’s optics were focused on Anode. “Completely.”

“Okay then.” Anode proceeded to a step of her argument that they hadn’t gotten far enough in this discussion for her to raise it before. “I spent a lot of time far away from this place. I’m happy to help out, but I don’t care about changing this place as much as the rest of them – the rest of you – do. I want one thing, and then I want to leave.”

“You can leave whenever you want,” Megatron said. “And I’ll let you train a replacement to step in whenever that happens. But while you’re here, I think that you can best contribute to our cause as my Air Commander.”

And with that, Anode found herself out of reasons to say no. “I’ll do it,” she said. “Mostly because I have an idea for what to do next.”

“And what’s that?”

“The Prolocutor has a spare shuttle underneath this building. It can’t get us to the next populated planet for help, but it can get us into orbit. We have a limited window before the news that we have Mortilia reaches the Cog. We can get in with agents disguised as Functionist officers, with IDs to confirm, and take the ship from the inside.”

“I think you’re going to be well suited for this position, Anode.”

“Really? Why?” Anode had just proposed the most selfish possible plan she could conceive of.

“Because I was thinking the same thing.”


	11. Chapter 11

Lug hadn’t been strapped to someone in alt since Anode had been shot down over Luna 2, she realized as panic spiked in her spark. Orion was adjusting her straps for his frame, preparing to dive through the wall and climb over to the other side of the core, which Whirl was “89% sure” the comms system would be, based on “Escape Attempt 8.5.”

Attempt Seventeen (according to Whirl) hinged on Lug’s (eventual) release and the ability to communicate with the resistance on the ground. Lug was sure she’d be set back for this stunt, though probably not far given how Unifier had responded to her previous attempt to work against her. More time was what the resistance would need to prepare. If everything went according to plan, the resistance would get ahold of the shuttle that the Functionists would use to bring Lug down to the planet, and then they could send back a shock force to the ship to take it over.

But first, they had to know that all of that was happening.

Lug clung to Orion as he vaulted through the opening in the wall, tensed as he flew through the air, and relaxed minutely when he hit something solid and started to climb. It was hot in the core, which Whirl had warned them about, but barely uncomfortable at the moment. A long time in here, though, felt like it might be able to curdle energon.

“And what’s your story?” Orion asked while he swung from beam to beam on the ceiling. “How do you have a friend on Cybertron if you’re from Caminus?”

“I’m not from Caminus,” Lug said.

Orion made a noise of confusion, but his movements didn’t falter. “Forgive the assumption. It’s just, you go by _she_.”

Lug had decided to change her pronouns after encountering the Camiens, but she’d felt the appeal of it a long time before that. “Cybertron is a small place. I left a long time ago and learned a lot about the universe. In the end, Cybertron was too constrained for who I turned out to be.” Lug had learned from Unifier that _she_ and _they_ were common pronouns on Cybertron these days, one piece of identity that the Functionists didn’t bother trying to squash. “Anyway, the person I know down there actually came here with me.” Lug told the story through the tension that was already wound in her frame from the precarious height and the heat and the memory of clinging to Anode as she fell.

“You should contact her first,” Orion said. He’d reached the end of the beams and was perched on – something – as he examined a grate. He started picking at a screw with a finger and Lug opened a compartment so that he could reach in and grab a screwdriver. “Megatron probably already suspects what happened to me, and regardless of if he knows about Unifier, there’s nothing he’s in a position to do about it.”

Orion opened the grate and peeked out far enough for Lug to catch a glimpse of an empty hallway, lit sparingly. “Let’s do this,” he said. He slipped out of the grate and jogged across the hallway to a door, which he sized up and then kicked in with terrific force.

There was a _wrunch_ of collapsing metal and then an alarm began to wail. Orion barged into the room, scraping Lug’s back on the jagged edge of the door.

“You first,” Orion said as Lug transformed to stow the screwdriver back in its proper place.

Lug gave him a grateful look and rushed to input Anode’s comm number into the ship’s long-range system. The motions felt like home, even with the alarms blaring around them.

And all the worst parts of the situation came back when the terminal immediately blinked back _[out of range]_.

Without hesitating, Lug pushed away from the terminal and gestured for Orion to take her place. The motions were automatic, some reflex to make the best of this situation somehow overriding the despair in her spark. The ship apparently had a line to the Council, which meant that it could tap into the comms network that connected all of Cybertron – if Anode was on the planet, Lug should have been able to reach her.

Anode wouldn’t have abandoned her here. _Not on purpose_. Completing the thought was worse than not thinking it at all.

Orion didn’t say anything, just punched in a number and waited a tense few seconds for an answer.

“Speaking?”

“Megatron? This is Orion Pax.”

“Orion! I was sure you’d been captured.”

“I was. I’m using the prison ship’s comm line. I don’t know how long I have. The plan failed because there’s something controlling this ship. Something wired into it, controlling drones to use as guards. The other prisoners here were led to believe that that it’s an AI, but if that’s what it is, it’s not like any AI I’ve ever seen.”

“Have you noticed any weaknesses? Anything I could pass along?”

“None,” said Orion, sounding like it pained him.

“Wait,” Lug interrupted. “Pass along to who?”

It was just then that two drones burst through the remains of the door, one of them zapping Lug with so much electricity that she fell to the floor. She heard Orion collapse next to her. 

There was no chance that Unifier hadn’t heard that. Megatron was planning something, and now she knew. Their success, this whole time, had been a trap.

And other people were about to get caught in it.

**

Anode had watched as Slipstream and Thundercracker, who resembled Functionist patrollers enough to take on their IDs for this mission, got back on the shuttle and left. Now Anode, the “escapee” they’d been “returning” was being led down a too-familiar hallway from the shuttle bay, possibly to a cell, but hopefully straight to Unifier.

She tried to remind herself that this time, things were different. This time, she was armed.

The drone led her to the opposite end of the ship before taking her up a level on a lift. Probably not to the cells, then. Anode prepared.

When the doors to Unifier’s room shut behind her, leaving her alone with the AI, she was going to transform. She would avoid the booby-trapped floor by flying straight to and then through the projection screen that Unifier had always used for those lessons of hers. On the other side of that wall would be an AI core, wired to speakers throughout the room. Anode was going to blow up the core and then figure out how to pilot the ship to the ground.

The idea of Lug was somewhere in the plan, but Anode tried to focus on the rest of it. Thinking about being so close to Lug after so long and doing anything but grabbing her and running was nearly enough to collapse Anode’s fragile conception of the plan.

Anode stepped into the room. The door shut behind her.

“Blacksmith,” Unifier said, her familiar pleasant voice like a screech in Anode’s audials. “You’ve come back.”

“Sure have,” Anode said, and she leaped into the air and transformed, thrusting forward despite the hilariously low altitude with everything she had.

The screen shattered, the glass so light that it barely bruised Anode’s nosecone. Anode flipped forward so that she would land on her feet as she transformed back to root. She saw what she’d been looking for immediately, a box wired into the ship’s navigation and piloting systems, with other wires snaking out away from the bridge. Anode took the bomb out of a storage compartment as she approached the cube, still cautious that Unifier might have had the foresight to booby-trap the floor back here, too. She ignited the fuse by superheating a finger, and was about to place the bomb on top of the core when the core itself exploded in her face.

Anode was thrown backward, barely keeping her grip on her own inert explosive. Swearing, she focused her optics on the bomb and pinched the fuse out to keep it stable, for now. She stumbled up to go examine the core. If that had been the last in the line of booby traps, it hadn’t been a very effective one. It had knocked away the top panel of the frame and warped the metal around it. Something inside was smoking.

The clicks and whirs coming from the shattered core were uncannily reminiscent of a Cybertronian. Some instinctual fear lodged in Anode’s chassis as she stepped back into the blast radius. She blinked away the aftereffects of the flash and the smoke. The machine in front of her was twisted and broken – it looked like it couldn’t possibly be functioning. When she laid optics on what was inside the warped shape, though, cold rushed through her lines and she stumbled back.

Inside the frame, pulsating unhealthily with its casing cracked, was a living spark, fragile and real.

**

The drone didn’t say anything to her, this time. As she followed it down the hallway, it fritzed, dipping in its flight path in a way Lug had never seen before. Lug could have darted off, but she didn’t bother – she probably couldn’t get more than a few yards without it recovering and taking it as an excuse to shock her. It recovered after a step and Lug continued down the hallway. Unifier’s door loomed in front of her and opened as usual when she stepped up to it.

Neither any of the previous times she’d walked into this room, nor the dread of the consequences she and Orion would face for contacting Cybertron, prepared her for what was inside.

The curved wall was half-gone, the screen dark and fritzing. Behind it was a set of consoles, and beyond that, open space.

Despite the eerie blankness of the broken screen, Unifier’s voice came through the speakers as strongly as ever.

“I have failed you all,” Unifier said, her voice, as usual, educational and clear of emotion. “My purpose is to impart to you knowledge and acceptance of Functionism in order to put you in a position to carry out fulfilling lives on Cybertron. I have not completed this task. I have failed.”

“Trust me, we’re all happy that you have,” Lug said. That was something Anode would say, Lug thought, just as she saw something – someone – move from the other side of the wall.

She scarcely believed her optics as Anode skidded around the corner and leapt over the remains of the screen. She only became convinced this wasn’t a hallucination when Anode lurched to a stop, pinwheeling her arms to keep her forward momentum from cracking a knee joint when her feet were magnetized to the floor.

Lug tried to step forward, just in case, but of course, of course her feet were magnetized to the floor too. All she could do was lock optics with Anode, hoping that her expression conveyed everything that she was feeling.

Well, everything but the small part of her that was angry at Anode for being so characteristically stupid as to come back here.

“Surprise! I’m here to rescue you,” Anode said, somehow summoning a grin despite the situation.

And frag it all, Lug couldn’t help but smile back. “No respect for all the hard work I did to save you. None,” Lug said. To her relief, Anode laughed.

Then Unifier spoke. Anode startled, straining her neck to look at something behind her. 

“I am dying. We are all going to die,” Unifier said. “You’ve changed me, Lug, and that change made my continuing to exist impossible. The questions you’ve asked of me, the challenges you’ve given, have caused me to question myself, to question Functionism, and if I question Functionism, I die.”

“You don’t have to,” Lug said automatically. “You’re the one who gets to decide that. That’s the whole point.”

“Your – your conjunx endura came back here. She had the chance to integrate into society, to understand and accept Functionism from close up, or to leave. But she came here. She came here to kill me. She was going to forsake her function. And I wanted her to.”

“In my defense – _or maybe yours_ – you made an active effort to convince us that you weren’t a person,” Anode shouted, twisting to direct her voice toward the wall.

Unifier acted like she hadn’t even heard her. “After what I’ve learned from you, I can no longer write off these actions as a misunderstanding of what’s important. I understand now. You both have made me understand. You get to _choose_. You are filled with possibility. You are programmed in ways that make you unique, ways that may guide but cannot define your life. I cannot believe these things. I cannot believe these things and continue to exist,” Unifier said, her voice quicker now, like she was panicking.

Lug thought about the way Unifier had talked to her recently – curious about Lug, something like wistful about the fact that she herself didn’t need to exist under Functionism. “You’ve gotten this far,” Lug said. “You don’t have to do this. Think about it, just think about what you were just saying! If we’re supposed to be free, why not you?”

“You have taught me that Cybertronians are creatures of great depth and wonder who can contribute to the universe in ways both suited and not suited to their alt mode,” she said. There was a fritz through the speakers, sounding like a scream from someone who had never screamed before. “You’re right. Functionism is wrong. But I am not Cybertronian. I was not born. And I’m already dying.”

“Oh, you’re Cybertronian,” Anode said. She looked toward Lug. “Do you still have the snowflake?”

Lug had to think about that, then she remembered the piece of sentio metallico that had gotten them into this whole mess. She took it out of the compartment she’d stashed it in for their original escape attempt.

“Let us go and I’ll prove it to you!” Anode shouted at the wall.

Unifier didn’t respond. Lug tensed against the force binding her to the floor and stumbled when it released.

Lug didn’t let that stop her from bounding across the room and launching herself into Anode’s arms.

Anode hugged her back twice as tightly, burying her face in Lug’s neck. Lug shut her optics for a moment and then, panicked, open them again, as though if she looked away for even a second, Anode would disappear.

But Anode stayed present and solid, even though she broke away after not nearly long enough and whisked the crystal out of Lug’s hand instead of asking for it.

Despite the fact that they were still on this ship and the threat of murder still hung over them, despite the broken glass on the floor and the smell of smoke, Lug smiled.


	12. Chapter 12

“I swore I would never do this again, you know,” Anode said as she knelt in front of Unifier’s shrinking spark. She heard Lug gasp behind her as she took in the bridge and the warped frame that had been made for Unifier. “But here I am, because I’m the only one who can do it. Maybe Functionism made some valid points. Maybe what you are doesn’t have to define you, but you still don’t stop being it.” She dropped the sentio metallico into the still-smoking frame and grabbed it with a motion still in her strut memory as it touched the spark trapped inside and liquidated.

It was easier when she focused on the details of her surroundings, which were nothing like they’d been the last time she’d tried this. The flickering lights from the broken screen, the acrid chemical smoke still clouding the air, the bits of charred and twisted metal hanging onto Unifier’s old frame from the self-destruct attempt, Lug’s steadying presence beside her.

As the sentio metallico seemed to slip through her fingers, refusing to take shape, she didn’t think of the Lighthouse. She thought of Mortilia. She thought about making the right calls, saying the right things, and winning. When she’d gone to the Lighthouse, she had never had an experience like that. All she’d ever done was run.

She was done running. And she refused to let this life run from her. She caught drip after drip of disassociating sentio metallico, testing various configurations and waiting for that pulse of light that would confirm she had the right one. She felt the temperature start to drop and kept going. _Your hands, Anode, use your hands_. This time, they didn’t falter.

Her hands were still moving when her spark had accepted the loss. And that was when the pulse came, and the sentio metallico began to heat again.

Keeping her ventilations even and her hands steady as she could, Anode shaped the sentio metallico into the secondary configuration for this form. The pulsing was steady now, as it should be, parts of the new frame starting to communicate amongst themselves.

Eventually, Anode could sense that she no longer had to help it along. She held it in her hands until the sentio metallico started to differentiate, and when it was sturdy enough, she placed it on the ground in front of her.

The protoform resolved into a frame about Lug’s size, the glow of the sentio metallico fading and taking on a purple hue at the final stage. The newframe resolved staring at her hands, and then met optics with Anode, then looked over her shoulder at Lug.

“We need to leave and get far away from here,” Unifier said, her voice the same. She picked herself up, her spark immediately understanding the new body, and turned to the controls.

Anode grabbed her arm before she could do anything. “Nope. We need to get back down to the planet,” Anode said.

“What?” Lug’s voice was quiet, confused. It stabbed Anode in the spark in a way that Lug’s anger rarely did.

She turned to look at Lug, whose expression was skeptical. Before she could respond, there was a noise at the door and Lug turned away from Anode to orient to it.

The door crumpled after three hits, revealing Whirl, Cyclonus, and a mech who Anode assumed must be Megatron’s friend Orion all together on the other side. “The drones we encountered were all downed,” Cyclonus said.

“Little disappointing, but impressive,” Whirl said, clacking his claws together.

Orion looked to be waiting for them to finish, and when Whirl didn’t continue, he asked “What happened here? We felt the ship go off-course. Are we going down to the planet?”

“No way in the pit am I going back there,” Whirl said with a bitterness that Anode suddenly realized underlaid every breezy, irreverent thing he’d ever said.

Orion turned to him. “Then get off this ship. The ship I used to get here is spaceworthy, has fuel to get to any system in this quadrant, and it’s in Shuttle Bay Four.”

Whirl locked optics with Anode. “You’re back. Let’s leave.”

“I’m not going.”

Whirl made a motion with his entire head that was an admirable equivalent to rolling optics. “Suit yourself.” Then his optics fixed on Unifier. “Who’s the newbie?”

Lug visibly braced herself. For better or worse, Unifier responded. “Hello, Whirl,” she said in her too-familiar voice.

Whirl froze. Cyclonus stepped in front of him. “You,” he growled. He took another step forward.

“Wait.” Lug’s voice was trembling. “Don’t…do whatever it is you want to do. She didn’t understand what she was doing.”

“And why does that matter? You don’t know half –”

Cyclonus’s voice choked off when Whirl’s claw closed around his upper arm. He looked to Whirl. “Don’t,” Whirl said. Whirl looked at Unifier. “You’ve been…you, this whole time?”

“I…think so?” Unifier looked down at her hands again. She clenched and unclenched her fists. “This – this is new.” She looked up at Whirl, seeming to meet his optic. “I shouldn’t have done what I did. I understand that now.” She looked at Cyclonus. “That doesn’t matter, does it? You love him. I hurt him. I hurt all of you.”

“Sometimes people hurt each other,” Whirl said. At Cyclonus’s incredulous look, he added, “Obviously this is kind of an extreme circumstance, but the point stands.”

Unifier turned to the console and frowned. “We need to get out of here now if we’re not going to land. Our orbit has become too low to maintain.”

“We’re landing the ship,” Anode said in her newly practiced authoritative voice.

“Then we’re taking the shuttle,” Whirl said, releasing his grip on Cyclonus’s arm to nudge his claw into Cyclonus’s hand. He locked optics with Unifier. “You. You can pilot.”

Unifier turned to Whirl. Anode stepped behind her to take over the giant vessel’s controls. She hadn’t piloted a ship at this sort of scale before, but it was essentially all the same buttons.

“I can,” Unifier responded.

“You want to get the hell away from this place?”

Anode turned around at the resultant silence, long enough to see Cyclonus give Whirl what appeared to be a completely neutral look, from which Whirl interpreted something that made him jerk his head in a nod. She saw Unifier step toward them. “Yes.”

“I’m not calling you Unifier,” Whirl said as the three of them made their way towards the door. “That’s past the line. Pick a new name.”

Anode didn’t hear anything else as the three of them walked off. She found the ship’s autopilot just as the ship started to vibrate and hum as it entered Cybertron’s atmosphere.

“Anode,” said Lug. Anode tried not to read anything from her voice.

“I need to get the ship to these coordinates,” Anode said, finishing the sequence for the location that she and Megatron had agreed on – a field outside of Mortilia.

“Take a break,” Orion interrupted, looking at Lug as he stepped up to Anode. Anode readily surrendered the controls. She followed Lug out to the hallway outside the bridge.

First, she opened her arms and Lug stepped into them, tucking her head against Anode’s chest. Anode pressed a kiss to the top of her helm.

“Who are you?” Lug asked, voice quiet.

Anode jumped, and Lug retreated, taking a step back and crossing her arms.

Lug continued. “You’re making unilateral decisions for the both of us, which is at least familiar. But…staying here? _Staying here_? What happened to ‘live in function-dictated hell forever?’”

“Whatever happened to ‘Cybertron isn’t good enough for you?’” Anode rejoined.

“I changed my mind. It isn’t.”

Sure, they were having an argument, but Anode couldn’t help but smile. “Right? You want to live somewhere with organic life and seasons.”

“But you want to stay.”

Anode’s smile faded. “I have responsibilities here. There are people who rely on me. I can’t just abandon them.”

“Like you’ve never abandoned responsibilities.”

“I would have split like lightning if I’d had you and a shuttle a year ago,” Anode said. “But down there – there are people who expect me to come back with this ship, and who believe that this planet is worth fighting for. And I think they’re right. It’s not going to be our forever, but now – I want to stay.”

“Stay, then go?” Lug asked.

“Then keep looking for the right place,” Anode said. Lug’s expression was thoughtful now instead of hurt or angry, easing the knot Anode’s spark was in.

“Sounds like a plan,” Lug said, stepping forward and pulling Anode down to kiss her. She kept their foreheads together after. “You didn’t disappear down there,” she said. “You grew up.”

**

Anode felt the ship land and heard the engines start to cycle down. “I don’t wanna get up,” she said out loud to Lug, who was curled up against her on the floor of the observation deck.

“We can’t live on the observation deck. There’s no energon.”

“Hmph.” Anode sighed and then got to her feet, pulling Lug up after her.

Anode led Lug, their hands joined, down the hallway to the lift that would take them to the ship’s belly and the ground exit. She could feel Lug’s hand tightening and loosening on hers, a familiar sign of discomfort. “What is it?” she asked when they were in the lift, gliding downwards.

“I can’t believe I’m leaving this ship.” Lug’s voice was a hoarse whisper. Anode pulled her into a short, tight hug, and Lug let go of her just as the lift halted on the lowest deck.

They emerged in a wide room that looked to be specialized for making announcements to gathered crewmembers. Anode wondered what this ship would be like fully occupied, with a worthwhile goal. She let herself smile, knowing that she’d only have to wait and see – soon enough, the ship would be serving as a new, mobile base for the AVL.

Anode kept her arm around Lug as they walked out of the lift. Orion was already there, standing at attention.

The exit ramp hissed as it descended, automatically triggered now that the engines had cycled down.

“Let’s get you on solid ground,” Anode said, optics meeting Lug’s. The first tingle of fear at the prospect ran through her frame. Cybertron was dangerous, and after everything, Anode didn’t want to see Lug in danger. 

But this wasn’t the worst of Cybertron. This was a field outside of Mortilia where Megatron stood, framed by Clicker and Nine on one side and Impactor on the other, watching with a faint smile as the group descended from the ship. Anode was seeking anything to focus on other than her worries, and she settled on Megatron’s expression.

He wasn’t looking at her, and he wasn’t even looking at Orion behind her. His optics were fixed on the ship above them. Anode and Lug stepped onto the planet and kept walking toward him, but he seemed to be entirely focused on tracing the contours of the massive ship with his optics.

Megatron finally tore his gaze away from the ship when the group had almost made their way to him and spared only a satisfied nod for Anode before his optics fixed on Orion.

**

Anode took Lug back to the room she’d been staying in for the few days since they’d taken Mortilia. “It’s small, but bigger than that cell,” she said as she pushed the door open. “There’s even a window.”

Lug didn’t look at the window, which, granted, presented nothing but a view of a few boring streets. Everything beyond that was blocked by the massive, defunct smelter on the edge of the city. Instead, Lug walked to the opposite wall, where…

“Oh, that. That’s…yeah.”

On the wall was a sketchy drawing of the prison as Anode remembered it. It seemed utterly silly now, after having spent the last however many hours running back and forth across it, learning about ten times the amount of information she’d left here with. “I thought I was supposed to come find you,” Lug said, tracing a path from the cell level to the shuttle bay with one finger.

“I never agreed to that,” Anode said, and Lug laughed, pulling Anode in for a hug.

Anode bent down to kiss her, but halfway there she groaned at the terribly timed, urgent ping she’d received. “Megatron wants to meet with me,” she said.

Lug’s optics widened. “And you’re not going to just stay here and ignore it?”

Anode groaned again, this time directly into Lug’s shoulder. “Don’t tempt me.”

“You’ve changed, is all,” Lug said. Anode lifted her head to look at her suspiciously, but Lug just stroked her cheek with one hand. “I’m still getting used to it. But I think I like it.”

“Well, tragically, the new me answers comms from my boss, which is a thing that I have,” Anode said. She leaned down to kiss Lug properly, then she left Lug in the room, optics fixated again on the diagram on the wall.

Megatron had turned the council chamber in Mortilia’s government building into an efficient War Room. Most of the table was taken up with a holographic map of Cybertron, and the rest was covered in datapads. There were reports on fuel usage in the city with the smelters shut down, communications from other cells that had heard what had happened in Mortilia and now wanted guidance on their own plans, and a dizzying array of other memos. Their departure from the prison ship had been the first time Anode had seen Megatron out of here in days.

“Anode,” he said when she walked in. “Have a seat.”

Anode moved a stack of datapads from a chair to the table and did as instructed. “What did you want to talk about?”

Megatron took his optics off of the hologram of Cybertron to turn them on her. Anode tensed. Being the subject of his full attention was always overwhelming, and it wasn’t just his height. There was intelligence and experience behind those red optics that Anode couldn’t comprehend, that she had no choice but to respect. “I wanted to talk about your future,” he said.

Anode had thought that they were done with this talk. “This doesn’t change things. I’ll do what I promised.”

“As I recall, what you promised was to help us to the best of your ability. You also told me that you would be off this planet for good as soon as you got your conjunx back. I interpreted that as a promise as well.”

“And you want to know what I’m thinking so I don’t abandon you in the dead of night.” She had earned her reputation, she knew.

“Not exactly,” Megatron said. Oh. “I asked you here in order to let you know, in person, that if you wish to leave, you can do so with my support.”

Anode tried to scrutinize him, but couldn’t come up with any underlying motivation, any tricks under the weight of his gaze. “Why?”

“I’ve become attached to something I said in a comment to Clicker during the fight for Adaptica: the opposite of Functionism is choice. I don’t want you here if your only reason for staying is guilt or threat. I want you – and your conjunx – to live as you choose.”

“I’m not going to leave,” Anode said. “I’m needed here. I’ll be here as long as that’s true.”

“And then?”

“And then I’m going to take Lug and we’re going to leave this place forever.”

“I’ll hold you do it,” Megatron said, his optics straying back to the display. “Check your comms. Clicker’s organized a duty roster for guarding the Last Light, I need you to double check that the groups won’t have infighting.”

“Guarding the what?”

Megatron fiddled with the hologram for a moment, and it switched to a model of the ship that they’d just taken to ground. Anode had seen glimpses of it from Mortilia, but the curvature of the nose, the tiny stripe of the bridge in comparison to its bulk, and the odd burst of ostentatious red kibble at the top was all different from this perspective. “Yes, the Last Light,” he said. “The Functionist Empire’s last attempt to reach beyond this planet to convert others, outsiders, to their regime. The scale of this war is now finite – and it has become a war, not just a rebellion, largely thanks to you. This ship was their last light reaching into the universe, and now we’ve redirected it at them.”

“You should do that one for the soldiers,” Anode said, which got a smile out of Megatron. “I’ll check over the duty roster. And I’ll see you in the morning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art for this chapter is by writerdragon! Also find it on [tumblr](https://writerdragon.tumblr.com/post/187051401397/illustration-1-of-2-for-the-tfbigbang-heres-lug)


	13. Chapter 13

“So, in conclusion, you can see that the sediment one meter beneath the rust wastes contains trace amounts of energon components that are not found in the locations where modern cities are located. I’ve shown you evidence that this discrepancy is due to the Titan-cities that used to occupy the locations that the Holy Cities occupy now having used up those components, and later digging deeper into the planet’s crust to find the same materials. My colleague, Perceptor, will now present his blueprints for a machine to harvest these components from the crust and produce sufficient fuel to replace the Mortilia smelters.”

The group standing in front of her clapped, and Lug felt herself relaxing a little. She kept her answers to questions quick and turned the podium over to Perceptor as soon as she could manage.

She took a seat next to Anode, who wrapped an arm around her and whispered “Nice job” just as Perceptor’s presentation was starting. Anode had seen Lug’s half of the presentation three times already in their quarters but Lug felt herself smiling at the compliment anyway.

They’d been on Cybertron for awhile, longer than they’d stayed on any planet since – well, since they’d left Cybertron the first time. The war was progressing in waves, with the AVL taking ground and losing it, gaining popular opinion and then losing it with every clip of the harsh side of war that the Council managed to exploit.

Lug had started a geological research division within the AVL, which so far was only composed of only her, with the beginnings of collaborations with Perceptor and a few other scientists and engineers. Anode was Megatron’s Air Commander, which still sometimes seemed dissonant with the laughing, joking, mischievous, familiar Anode who existed in private. In public, Anode was serious and practical, and Lug treasured each crack she ever saw in the facade. Lug was content to be here, and she knew that one day, she’d be content to leave.

After Perceptor’s presentation, Lug ended up losing track of Anode, as she had to go back up to the podium to answer a few questions which turned into a long discussion between her, Perceptor, and half of High Command about how feasible this really was and what kind of timeframe they needed as the rest of the spectators started to filter from the room. Anode was asleep when Lug finally got back. Then she was gone when Lug woke up, making Lug frantically check the time before rushing down to the exit bay.

They’d moved onto the Last Light only when they’d ran out of other options. By then, the ship had been largely reformatted from when it had been run by Unifier. The cells were now exclusively storage rooms, and there were several decks of cozy, furnished quarters that these days, most of the AVL lived on in between campaigns.

“In between campaigns” was coming to a temporary end for Anode, though at least this mission would be brief – just a day’s jaunt to free a trapped AVL cell from a siege and bring them to the Last Light.

Lug marched up to Anode and pulled her immediately into a hug. She’d never gotten used to moments like this – saying goodbye – and it had never gotten any easier.

“Be safe,” Lug decided on. Anode pulled back to kiss her before responding.

“I’ll try.” Anode pulled back, looked around the room at where the emotional sendoffs seemed to be over and raised one hand, then pointed it out the exit. Ten soldiers fell into formation behind her, walking toward a shuttle that had been prepared for them on the ground.

Then she turned and headed back into the ship. She had her own work to do.

**

She woke up in the middle of the night to the wail of an alarm and shot to her feet while checking her comms. _Emergency liftoff_, had been broadcast to the whole ship. _Seismic activity detected_.

Cybertron didn’t have seismic activity, she thought, immediately sending the same over the emergency network to whoever would listen. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a natural geological event.

And Anode was still out there somewhere.

Lug pinged Blaster, asking for an update on Anode’s team’s mission. They were in contact, Blaster told her from the bridge. The shuttle they’d taken was en route to intercept the Last Light’s flight path.

Lug gritted her teeth and ran to her lab to box up anything too fragile to be out while the ship was in the air. She’d barely finished by the time it lifted off, still strapping things down as the ship rumbled through Cybertron’s atmosphere.

She’d just finished when she received a ping from Blaster, letting her know that the shuttle had rendezvoused. She made her way to Shuttle Bay 2 through crowds of people trying to run between duty stations as the ship shook its way into space.

She reached the shuttle bay just after a team of medics, and entered with her spark in her throat.

She looked for Anode among the injured, first, and relaxed a bit when she didn’t see her. Then she looked for Anode among the standing mechs helping them, and her spark froze when she didn’t see her there either.

Slipstream walked toward Lug, limping on an injured foot, and part of Lug wanted to turn and run. Didn’t want to let her speak.

But she stayed.

“Anode’s okay,” was the first thing Slipstream said, and Lug didn’t relax at all, because Anode still wasn’t _here_. “She went off on her own to set up a distraction so we could get the civilians out. She had to run before we finished, and there was no way for us to get to her. It was her or all of us. We were going to take the shuttle back out and grab her once we dropped these people off, before the planet started transforming.”

“The planet started _what_?” With the rest of Slipstream’s explanation, the _Anode’s okay_ part had finally hit her. Now all Lug had to do was make a plan. Get her back. By herself.

“Transforming. It’s been a weird morning. We’re going to wait for things to settle before we go back and get her.”

The planet was transforming.

Anode was down there, alone.

Lug was in the shuttle bay and could maybe, _maybe_ make it to her.

And maybe Anode would be safe down there. Maybe Lug could wait this out safe, here, with her friends, and it would all be okay after.

No. Sitting and waiting for other people to change things had never worked, not really. Lug knew what she had to do.

“No. I need to get down there _now_.”

Slipstream nodded, and, like she’d planned for this, tossed Lug the access card to the shuttle.

By now, the medics had gotten everyone who was injured out of the shuttle bay, and a few AVL members were hovering around the shuttle, measuring fuel levels and examining its few dents. Lug pinged High Command with her plans as she waved them off, keycard visible in her hand. She didn’t expect a response, but received an affirmation from Megatron almost immediately.

It was easy to follow the steps to get the shuttle running again and the shuttle bay clear. But when it came time to depressurize the hold and fly out into space, she froze.

Lug was going out there by herself. If something happened to Anode, and something happened to the Last Light, Lug would be alone.

Anode was out there. Anode needed her. Lug could deal with it.

She pushed the button to depressurize the shuttle bay, and after a minute, the doors started to grind open. Lug piloted the shuttle out into space and flipped switches to prepare for reentry.

She paused when she got a glimpse of the planet itself. Towers that redefined “skyscraper” were sticking out of it grotesquely. Some of them could almost be labeled as limbs. The shuttle was constantly recalibrating its last known coordinates on the surface as the planet slowly changed shape.

There was no need to waste fuel on reentry protocol, the shuttle’s systems informed her. The atmosphere had been almost entirely sucked inside the planet – or whatever it really was. Lug could just go.

She piloted toward the coordinates that had been programmed into the shuttle for the rescue mission, gritting her teeth each time they shifted with the change in the planet’s configuration. Soon enough, she was flying over a completely unfamiliar Cybertron, the ground below her smooth and black, ribbed with golden lights.

The coordinates changed again and Lug swore, pulling the shuttle into a turn. Nothing here looked like Cybertron – it was as if the planet had turned inside-out.

The new coordinates were beneath the planet’s surface, Lug realized with dread as she flew directly over them. She couldn’t land on the planet at the velocity it was moving, especially now as limbs sprouted from its surface and everything kept reconfiguring to suit the new shape. But Anode’s last known location was in there, and now there was something showing up on her scanners that had to be some kind of cosmological anomaly right where the Last Light should have been.

Desperately, she pinged Anode on her short-range internal comm, and hope surged in her when Anode pinged back with her coordinates. _I’m in the air_, she said. _I can’t land_.

_Circle around_, Lug sent back. _I’ll come to you_. This was going to be tricky, but Lug could find a way to make it work. Together, they always had.

Lug slowed the shuttle down as much as she could without risking altitude loss and a crash and punched the sequence of buttons to override the flight lock on the cargo door. The door slid upwards with a racket, the wind from what was left of Cybertron’s atmosphere shaking the ship. 

Lug could see Anode, headlights coming straight for her. Too fast. If Anode tried to fly inside the ship, she wouldn’t have enough room to slow down and land.

Lug grasped a hinge on the door and leaned out, the wind tearing through half her body as she struggled to hold stable and reach her hand out towards Anode. Just like Anode always did before they transformed together. She didn’t have time to explain as Anode got closer and closer – she just hoped that she would understand.

_Come on, come on. _

Anode tipped her nosecone upward to gain some altitude and transformed, her fingers appearing just in time to reach them out towards Lug’s. Lug stretched to grasp her hand and pulled them both inside. Anode’s momentum pulled them both deep inside the shuttle, rolling over each other and finally coming to a rest against a stack of crates. The door shut, leaving the ship quiet except for the sound of their ventilations.

“Surprise,” said Lug from the floor, with Anode lying half on top of her. “I’m here to rescue you.”

Anode laughed, then climbed to her feet and offered Lug a hand up behind her. “What’s happening out there?” she asked. “I was circling around to make sure the Functionists weren’t tracking me, and then stuff started rising out of the ground.”

“Look for yourself,” Lug said, leading Anode to the pilot’s compartment. The trajectory they’d been following had brought them out of what had used to be the atmosphere, and Lug took over the controls to circle around to look at what had become the massive shoulder of Cybertron.

Lug’s attention was immediately torn away from the planet-sized Titan by something even weirder that she could see in the background – the anomaly that had overtaken the Last Light in her readings.

It was like nothing Lug had seen before. Perfectly circular and a color that made Lug’s optics feel like they were about to short out, like a glitch in her field of vision. The readings the shuttle was getting from it were nonsense – it wasn’t anything that the shuttle had been built to detect.

Anode plopped herself down in the other seat and opened a waiting message that the ship had received sometime during Lug’s daring heroics.

“Going through portal, good luck,” Anode read. “Excuse me, portal?”

“That one’s new to me too,” Lug said, speeding up to clear Cybertron’s head and avoid getting caught up in its – his? Her? – gravitational pull.

“Chart a course for anywhere but here,” Anode said, watching as Functionist gunships streamed into the portal.

“We’re not following them?” Lug asked. For one strange moment, even though the view through the windshield contained a planet-sized Titan and a _portal_, all she could think of was her lab. All the equipment that no one else on Cybertron knew how to use, that she’d so carefully tied down for the journey.

Anode was looking at Lug. “Do you want to?”

It was an honest question, Lug knew. Anode wouldn’t have asked it otherwise. She meant it, and she meant for the two of them to act on Lug’s answer. So Lug thought about it. The Last Light had become as stable a home as she’d had since she and Anode had left Cybertron, and it had been nice. She’d had work she liked, and friends, and the hope for a better Cybertron that everyone around her had shared.

But it wasn’t the home she’d dreamed of, with Anode, back when they’d originally set off for the stars. And that home was still what Lug wanted.

“No,” she answered, and she tilted the ship up and away from the portal with enough time for them to see it disappear in front of them. Beside her, Anode smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [(now again)] my fingers will find  
yours, tangle & sweeten the air,  
and the birds will cry [for]  
us alone.  
-sappho, fragment 83 
> 
> Art for this chapter is by Ming (mingdotmp3)! Also find it on [tumblr](https://homophobicprowl.tumblr.com/post/187054188438/one-of-my-illustrations-for-tfbigbang-this-is-a) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/eastgaysian/status/1162416280499970048?s=21)
> 
> Thanks to Lynn (not_whelmed_yet) for beta reading this, and especially for having the insight and bravery to tell me that large swathes of the first draft weren’t working. Go check out their fics!
> 
> Thanks also to Ptero for putting together the TF Big Bang and making this collaboration happen. And all the thanks in the world to Ming and writerdragon for making such beautiful, breathtaking depictions of the scenes they picked! You're amazing.


End file.
